Hessam Mehr PhD MRSC

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow University of Glasgow, UK | 2022–2025

My fellowship leverages automation and computational modelling to radically expand the gamut of interpretable experimental regimes in chemistry, with chemistry in aerosols as a first paradigm. I have created a modular, digitally controlled aerosol reactor — the first of its kind — and championed its adoption as a medium for chemical synthesis and discovery. Applications ranging from materials chemistry to antimicrobial discovery are being pursued within my group and via collaborations.

Post-doctoral Researcher Cronin Group, University of Glasgow, UK | 2018–2022

Focus areas include (i) the digitisation of synthetic chemistry, leading to two Science papers and commercialisation via a patent that now underpins a £40M spin-out company; and (ii) algorithmic discovery of new reactivity via automated platforms integrating online analytical instruments.

NMR Specialist Health Canada, Canada | 2017–2018

I devised a system combining signal processing algorithms with probability theory to automate the quantitative analysis of complex forensic drug samples. Alongside continued development at Health Canada and nationwide deployment, the underlying technical innovations were published in a special issue of Mag. Reson. Chem.

PhD – Chemistry University of British Columbia, Canada | 2012–2017

From doped silicon to superconductors, the ability to fine-tune materials’ electronic structure has transformed the landscape of possible material properties. Translating this idea to the field of organic chemistry, I demonstrated how the interplay of molecular shape and electron delocalisation can modulate and even defy properties like aromaticity.

BSc – Electrical Engineering Sharif University of Technology, Iran | 2005–2009

Focus areas: Digital signal processing, photonic crystals.

▶ Programmable general-purpose chemical synthesis in the aerosol phase and its automated implementation in an open hardware platform

Wosik, J.; Zhu, C.; Mehr, S. H. M., Under review, 2025 (preprint: 10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-mkmn0)

Building blocks for synthetic chemistry in aerosols: This paper lays the conceptual foundations for, and provides a practical laboratory implementation of, general-purpose chemical synthesis in aerosols. Synthesis in microdroplets has historically been difficult to reconcile with traditional laboratory workflows, hence hardly explored in synthetic chemistry. Tackling these issues using new hardware and analytics, it provides access to vast reactivity information and chemical phenomena at different lengths scales, as well as an arena for the development of new green synthesis methodology.

▶ Digital discovery and the new experimental frontier

Mehr, S. H. M. Digital Discovery, 2025 (10.1039/D5DD00029G)

Enriching rather than trivialising chemistry via digitisation: Growing interest in machine learning and automation in chemistry raises the question of whether future chemistry will be “lab-free” or reduced to massive robotic chemistry farms to harvest information and AI models to ingest it. I explore possibilities beyond these extremes, where enabling exploration of richer experimental spaces unlocks a third, more exciting, direction for digitisation.

▶ In situ synthesis within micron-sized hydrogel reactors created via programmable aerosol chemistry

Zhang, L.; Mehr, S. H. M. Digital Discovery, 2024 (10.1039/D4DD00139G)

Aerosol-generated hydrogel microdroplets as miniature self-assembled reactors: Hydrogel matrices hold promise as a locus for inhomogeneous chemistry, especially in the micron range, where reactants and products can be transported via diffusion. In this work, we generated reactive microdroplets of sodium alginate which, upon contact with and cross-linking with a reagent-loaded solution of calcium ions, acted as hydrogel containers for subsequent in situ reactivity within them. Featured on the front cover of December 2024 issue.

▶ Reaction blueprints and logical control flow for parallelized chiral synthesis in the Chemputer

Šiaučiulis, M.; Knittl-Frank, C.; Mehr, S. H. M; Clarke, E.; Cronin, L. Nat. Chem., 2024 (10.1038/s41467-024-54238-6)

Early means of programming robotic modules for chemical synthesis show immense promise for deployment in research and industrial labs, but lack the fundamental constructs — re-usable reactions, parallel synthesis, and a higher-level representation of reagents and hardware — needed to tackle more ambitious synthetic challenges. I designed a first-class implementation of these constructs in the χDL 2.0 language whilst maintaining compatibility with the existing repertoire of procedures digitised via χDL 1.0.

▶ Investigating and Quantifying Molecular Complexity Using Assembly Theory and Spectroscopy

Jirasek, M.; Sharma, A.; Bame, J.; Mehr, S. H. M., et al. ACS Cent. Sci., 2024 (10.1021/acscentsci.4c00120)

Tandem mass spectrometry is a formidable tool for analysing complex mixtures of unknown compounds, e.g. exoplanet samples, but pinpointing compounds of interest without extrapolating from currently known species remains a challenge. In this collaboration with the Cronin Group, I devised a recursive algorithm (RecursiveMA) that searches tandem MS dataset for evidence of shared molecular building blocks, quantitatively differentiating complex molecules from those that are simply large.

▶ Digitizing chemical discovery with a Bayesian explorer for interpreting reactivity data

Mehr, S. H. M.; Caramelli, D.; Cronin, L. PNAS, 2023 (10.1073/pnas.2220045120)

A fresh take on AI in chemistry: The applications of AI in chemistry are proliferating, yet instead of empowering expert chemists to undertake larger-scale experiments, most efforts supplant the chemist with data-hungry and opaque models. Bridging Bayesian probability and chemistry, we built a system that encodes and formalises chemists’ intuition into a probabilistic model working in tandem with a robotic chemistry platform to explore large experimental spaces and plan next investigations.

▶ Automated Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Complex Forensic Drug Samples using ¹H NMR

Mehr, S. H. M.; Tang, A. W.; Laing, R. R. Magn. Reson. Chem., 2023 (10.1002/mrc.5265)

Digital signal processing and statistics to counter drug epidemics: Developing bespoke analytical protocols for drug detection is resource intensive and time consuming, incompatible with tackling rapidly emerging crises, such as the fentanyl epidemic. At Health Canada, we demonstrated an automated ¹H NMR-based pipeline, based on advanced signal processing techniques and statistical inference, that can be applied to new analytes and sample types with little adaptation or method development.

▶ Digitization and validation of a chemical synthesis literature database in the ChemPU

Rohrbach, S.; Šiaučiulis, M.; Chisholm, G.; Pirvan, P.-A.; Saleeb, M.; Mehr, S. H. M.; et al. Science, 2022 (10.1126/science.abo0058)

▶ A universal system for digitization and automatic execution of the chemical synthesis literature

Mehr, S. H. M.; Craven, M.; Leonov, A. I.; Keenan, G.; Cronin, L. Science, 2020 (10.1126/science.abc2986)

Hardware-independent synthesis automation: Digitising synthesis requires in-depth knowledge of vendor specific programming interfaces and lengthy development to adapt literature protocols to robotic execution. Our high-level hardware-independent chemical programming language XDL formalises the chemical literature’s universal method for describing synthesis procedures in prose and translates these descriptions to robot-ready instructions.

▶ Stabilization of a Strained Heteroradialene by Peripheral Electron Delocalization

Mehr, S. H. M.; Patrick, B. O.; MacLachlan, M. J. Org. Lett., 2016 (10.1021/acs.orglett.6b00577)

Aromaticity challenged: We designed & synthesised a molecule shaped by three conflicting forces — aromaticity, strong peripheral electron delocalisation and steric interactions at odds with both of these. The resulting structure demonstrates the power of molecular design to elicit exceptional properties from ordinary functional groups, and a new strategy for molecular activation.

Building a digital chemistry lab Royal Society of Chemistry Books

Mehr, S. H. M. Book proposal accepted with publication in the RSC Foundations Series expected in 2025.

Creative use of time, space, and energy for accelerated green chemical discovery

Invited seminar, Institute of Chemical Sciences, Heriot–Watt University, 2025

Time-Resolved Chemical Discovery in a Mass Spectrometer-Coupled Programmable Aerosol Reactor

Annual Aerosol Science Conference, York, 2024

Bringing back the human touch: Expert-in-the-loop AI in chemistry using probabilistic models

7th RSC AI in Chemistry Symposium, Cambridge, 2024

Aerosols as a new reaction medium for massively parallel chemical discovery

Annual Aerosol Science Conference, Teddington, 2023

Probablistic reasoning: From interpreting known chemistry to discovering the unknown

Invited talk, ScotCHEM Computational Chemistry Symposium, Edinburgh, 2022

Automated chemical synthesis platform GB, WO2021219999 (A1), 2021; US 17/922,240, 2023

Cronin, L.; Mehr, H.; Craven, M.; Leonov, A. I.

Digital Discovery Emerging Investigator RSC Digital Discovery Journal | 2025

Nominated as a Digital Discovery Emerging Investigator: “an up-and-coming researcher making a significant contribution to accelerated science using machine learning, robotics, AI or quantum computing”. Invited to contribute to forthcoming themed collection.

Early-Career Research Excellence Award (£10k) University of Glasgow | 2024

Research Workshop Grant: Sound Chemistry (£7k) Royal Society of Edinburgh | 2023–2024

With RSEd’s support, I organised the first workshop dedicated to the novel strategies for creating compartments and containers to enable future chemistry.

Research Enablement Grant (£10k) Royal Society of Chemistry | 2023–2024

Via this grant, we explored the applications of acoustic fields to generating contact-free chemical reactors, fostering collaboration with leading European groups in Bristol, Pamplona, and Helsinki.

Lord Kelvin / Adam Smith Leadership Fellowship (£100k) University of Glasgow | 2022–2025

UofG’s flagship Lord Kelvin / Adam Smith (LKAS) Fellowship Scheme — established to support outstanding early-career researchers on the trajectory to becoming leaders in their field.

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (£300k) Leverhulme Trust | 2022–2025

My proposal “Investigating the dark reactions present in chemical space” focused on automated discovery of reactions remaining unknown due to inherent bias in current experimental technique.

Early Career Award ScotCHEM | 2021

ASPIRE Challenge Awards NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Science | 2019

University of Glasgow Shadow Board Leadership | 2022–2025

Contributing to the board’s mission of being a “critical friend” to senior UofG management. I advocated for specific concerns of early-career researchers and initiated the conversation within the board about widening recruitment to under-represented groups in the University.

Nuffield Research Placements Mentorship & public engagement | 2023–2024

Widening participation summer research placements for high school students.

Hack the ARC & ARC MakerSpace Public engagement | 2024

Used a £2,500 grant from UofG ARC to curate a series of pop-up hacker/maker stations. The versatility of these stations — covering drag-and-drop programming of embedded microcontroller board, prototyping tools and electronic circuits — combines with larger investment in ARC maker tools to enable a wide range of researcher-led outreach activities.

Sound Chemistry Workshop | 2024

Conceived and organised a workshop bringing together four European institutions (Heidelberg, Navarre, Bristol, Cardiff) at the forefront of new techniques for confinement of matter, with the central question of whether future chemical reactions could be contained and manipulated using software, e.g. via acoustic fields, rather than glassware.

Digital chemistry for digital natives Outreach | 2021

This RSC Outreach Grant-supported workshop series introduced Glasgow high schoolers to cutting-edge advances in digital chemistry, ending with in a practical session on building a sub-£20 titrator robot. My work was showcased in the micro:bit LIVE conference.

Chemical Studies Leadership, mentorship & hands-on workshop implementation | 2023–25

Chemical Studies is a University of Glasgow Chemistry stream aimed at distilling the spectrum of skills and experience chemistry undergraduate in a format tailored to students ineligible for the full MSc. As a co-organiser of this innovative programme for the past two years, I mentored small groups of students through the formulation of a research question; guiding them towards a tractable laboratory implementation, followed by 4 intensive lab sessions culminating in a group dissertation and poster.

Year 2&3 MChem Tutorials| 2022–25

Year 1 Science Fundamentals (non-chemist cohort) Lectures and revision tutorials| 2022–25

Year 1 MChem Synthesis laboratory | 2023–24