Dr.
Hessam Mehr
Affiliated Member
Hessam grew up in Iran, where he finished his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering. In 2010, he moved to Canada for a PhD in supramolecular chemistry with Prof. Mark MacLachlan. Afterwards, he briefly left the academia to work on automated analysis of drug samples using NMR at Health Canada, but was lured back by the idea of digitizing chemistry and joined the Cronin group as a post-doc in March 2018.
As part of the Chemputer team, Hessam was involved in the development of the XDL chemical programming language and exploration of its applications as universal code for chemical synthesis and autonomous discovery. He was also a team leader in the Artificial Life team (2021–22) and led the evolution of XDL from version 1.0 to 2.0.
In May 2021, Hessam was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (starting May 2022) in support of his proposal for next generation chemical discovery engines. In his free time, he enjoys biking, baking bread, cooking, learning new (human and computer) languages, and hacking on electronics with friends.