Kiran Vaddi, Ph.D.

I am a Foreign Guest Researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology working on the Autonomous Formulation Project. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a UW Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the eScience Institute. As part of my involvement with the data science community, I co-chaired the eScience Institute’s weekly postdoc seminar series (2021–2022).

My research lies at the intersection of machine learning and materials science, with a focus on building autonomous experimentation workflows for materials discovery and design. Broadly, I develop models and representations that bridge physical insight and data-driven methods to accelerate the discovery of soft materials and nanostructures. My Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering (University at Buffalo, SUNY) focused on developing physics-based and data-driven models for material optimization and structure–property mapping. I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, with a specialization in thermal engineering.

My research and contributions to the autonomous material discovery community has been recognized with APS DSOFT Futute Investigator Award (2025), Outstanding Reviwers Award from RSC Digital Disocvery (2023), and an invited panel from Kavli Foundation (2023)

Research Interests

My core research interest is in learning interpretable representations for data-efficient scientific discovery, especially in settings where experimental data is expensive or sparse. I work on developing differentiable, geometry-inspired models that integrate active learning and reinforcement learning for autonomous experiment design. I am particularly interested in representations grounded in topology and differential geometry to make scientific workflows both computationally efficient and physically meaningful.

Beyond Research

Outside the lab, I’m a passionate follower of cricket and have been watching, analyzing, and writing about the game for over two decades. I also enjoy Formula 1—my weekends are often booked during the race season. I dabble in music production and play a bit of keyboard, with musical tastes ranging from A. R. Rahman to twenty one pilots and Yanni.