Co-mentors Elif Ertekin Mechanical Science and Engineering Placid Ferreira Mechanical Science and Engineering Social impact Provide sophisticated data driven approaches to enable high quality, reproducible synthesis of nanomaterials for use as manufactured components in nanoelectronics. Project description Material synthesis is a primary bottleneck in emerging nanoelectronic devices. The promise of nanoelectronics will not become a reality unless the synthesis process is scalable and leads to high quality, reproducible materials. Although there exists a tremendous amount of academic and industry research in synthesis, most advancements in synthesis science are achieved by expensive and tedious trial and error approach. In this project, we will go beyond the traditional trial and error approach by adopting a data-driven methodology to rapidly optimize the chemical vapor deposition synthesis of graphene and other emerging 2D nanomaterials. The key aspects include building and populating a large database of synthesis parameters and results, and implementing a system for automated data capture and extraction from actual growth experiments in real time. The database will be populated by both experiments carried out at Illinois and via crowd-sourcing from research groups around the world. Students will develop and populate the 2D materials synthesis database, and will implement a tool that interfaces the database with Python-based libraries for supervised machine learning to perform targeted growth parameter optimization. Students will also develop a configurable system for automated data collection from nanofabrication tools during growth experiments in real time. Experimental parameters will be pushed to a cloud server so that they can be curated and served to computational models. Educational video tutorials on the synthesis database and the machine learning approach will be developed. These videos will be placed on the nanoHUB and aimed at audiences comprised of high school and undergraduate students.