Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith
(they/them/their)

Ad Astra Fellow, Assistant Professor of Digital Chemistry, University College Dublin (UCD)
Adjunct Professor of Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

Hello! I'm a teacher-scholar currently based in Dublin, Ireland. Though my training is in materials science and my professional affiliations are in chemistry and chemical engineering, my research interests are broad, including not only areas of the chemical sciences (e.g., sustainable chemistry, catalysis, electrochemistry, chemical reaction networks) but also network science, data science, pedagogy, philosophy (philosophy of science and ethics), mathematics (combinatorics), and more.

While at CMU, I founded the Community of Researchers Assessing Chemical Transformations and Exploring Reactivity (CoReACTER), a democratic, anti-oppressive research organization. Reach out if you're interested in getting involved!

email // cv // scholar // codeberg // orcid

Background and Experience

Before joining UCD, I was a Carnegie Bosch Institute Fellow, collaborating with Prof. Rachel Kurchin in the Materials Science and Engineering department at CMU, and before that, I completed a brief postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Gabe dos Passos Gomes, also at CMU.

I obtained my PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was advised by Prof. Kristin Aslaug Persson. During my PhD studies, I held the Philomathia Graduate Student Fellowship through the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute.

Prior to attending UC Berkeley, I received my Bachelor of Science in Materials Science and Engineering from Columbia University in 2019. During my undergraduate education, I conducted research on nanoparticle self-assembly dynamics with Irving P. Herman and explored organic reactions for thermochemical energy storage applications with Anubhav Jain and Ravi Prasher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Teaching

Below are the courses that I'm currently teaching or contributing to. A full list of modules that I've worked on can be found here.

Spring 2026:

Research Highlights

Below are listed some recent research efforts that I've been involved in. My full list of publications can be found here, and I describe my current research interests in more detail here.

Considering the ethics of large machine learning models in the chemical sciences (2025)
 Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith
 Machine Learning: Science and Technology / preprint / code / bibTeX
The Open Molecules 2025 (OMol25) Dataset, Evaluations, and Models (2025)
 Daniel S. Levine*, Muhammed Shuaibi*, Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith, Michael G. Taylor, Muhammad R. Hasyim, Kyle Michel, Ilyes Batatia, Gábor Csányi, Misko Dzamba, Peter Eastman, Nathan C. Frey, Xiang Fu, Vahe Gharakhanyan, Aditi S. Krishnapriyan, Joshua A. Rackers, Sanjeev Raja, Ammar Rizvi, Andrew S. Rosen, Zachary Ulissi, Santiago Vargas, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Samuel M. Blau, Brandon M. Wood
 arXiv / preprint / code / bibTeX
A database of molecular properties integrated in the {M}aterials {P}roject (2023)
 Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith, Orion Archer Cohen, Samuel M. Blau, Jason M. Munro, Ruoxi Yang, Rishabh D. Guha, Hetal D. Patel, Sudarshan Vijay, Patrick Huck, Ryan Kingsbury, Matthew K. Horton, Kristin A. Persson
 Digital Discovery / preprint / code / bibTeX
Elementary Decomposition Mechanisms of Lithium Hexafluorophosphate in Battery Electrolytes and Interphases (2023)
 Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith*, Thea Bee Petrocelli*, Hetal D. Patel, Samuel M. Blau, Kristin A. Persson
 ACS Energy Letters / preprint / code / bibTeX
Predictive stochastic analysis of massive filter-based electrochemical reaction networks (2023)
 Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith*, Daniel Barter*, Nikita S. Redkar, Aniruddh Khanwale, Shyam Dwaraknath, Kristin A. Persson, Samuel M. Blau
 Digital Discovery / preprint / code / bibTeX

Additional Information