A year in review
A look back at 2025 and what’s ahead at the Acceleration Consortium (AC). Based at the University of Toronto, the AC is a global community of academia, government, and industry who are accelerating the discovery of new materials and molecules needed for a sustainable future.
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At the Acceleration Consortium (AC), 2025 has once again been a year of great momentum, building on the generous grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF). And we’re still just getting started! Below we’ve rounded up some highlights, but you can get a more extensive look at what we’ve been up to in our annual impact report.
Research and Innovation
Our scientists and faculty are actively researching the advances in AI and automation required to develop modular, flexible self-driving labs (SDLs) that can be used to discover or optimize useful materials. Here are some breakthroughs over the past year:
ORGANA – An innovative voice-operated assistive robotic system designed to transform lab automation, will work with researchers to plan, automate and schedule experiments.
RoboCulture – An affordable and flexible robotics platform for automated biological experimentation that uses a general-purpose robotic arm to automate essential biological tasks.
AGILE Platform – integrates deep learning with combinatorial chemistry to rapidly design and test ionizable lipid nanoparticles, revealing cell-specific structure–function relationships that improve mRNA delivery.
The AC’s Inorganic SDL used an electrochemical platform to discover 7 new electrocatalysts for green hydrogen production free of iridium, a costly, rare-earth mineral, with the best-in-class combination of stability and activity.
We’ve funded over $2.5M in research through our Seed, Moonshot, and Translation grants. We also awarded our first round of dedicated funding to social science and humanities researchers to support interdisciplinary research that explores the societal implications of speeding up science with AI and automation. Read about the 2025 recipients and learn how you can qualify to receive funding for 2026.
Training and Outreach
Supported by a $1.6M NSERC grant to the AC, we launched the interdisciplinary CREATE for Accelerated Discovery (AccelD) program—the first in Canada to train highly qualified personnel in AI-, data-, and automation-enabled materials discovery.
We advanced graduate training with a first-of-its-kind self-driving lab course— Advanced AI for Materials developed by Jason Hattrick-Simpers. This course taught students the principles of active learning and AI for science and built real control loops for AC-designed robots. Don’t forget to check out our current micro-credential courses offered through U of T’s school of continuing studies.
As part of our commitment to understanding the ethical dimensions of our work, we visited “Chemical Valley” in Sarnia, Ontario—one of Canada’s largest petrochemical hubs, responsible for roughly 40% of national petrochemical production and home to more than 60 industrial facilities. The tour was organized by the Environmental Data Justice lab (EDJ) and the Indigenous Science and Ethical Substance lab (ISES) in the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) at U of T. Read our reflections.
We put women in STEM in the spotlight (where they belong!) with a new video series showcasing their impact on accelerated discovery, supported by the AC’s EDI Initiate grant funding.
Translation and Commercialization
In partnership with UBC, the AC awarded nearly $400,000 to support translational research that bridges fundamental science and practical applications. The funded projects span a wide range of research areas from new AI methods for smarter self-driving labs, to high-throughput electrochemical experimentation, scalable synthesis of electrocatalysts, and smart platforms to predict the solubility of molecules.
The AC works closely with industry partners to ensure that our research has real-world impact. To support this goal, the scale-up self-driving lab at UBC created an Industrial Scientific Steering Committee, made up of experts from 15 major pharmaceutical and synthetic chemistry companies. Their engagement led to key activities such as cross-site lab visits, new research collaborations, and initiatives to promote HQP training.
Our continued work with industry this year also included a collaboration between U of T and BASF to accelerate the design of chemical products for agriculture, coatings, and drug delivery. The AC is also collaborating with Unilever to use SDLs to optimize submicron emulsions across personal care, pharmaceuticals, food, and agriculture.
We brought Accelerate back home to Toronto, hosting our largest conference yet with more than 430 attendees. The countdown has begun for AI4X - Accelerate, happening June 15–19, 2026, in Singapore. Interested in getting involved? Submit your abstract by Jan 17, 2026!
The AC has helped launch four Canadian startups to date, including SymBL, an industrial biotech company that uses a microbiome SDL to design microbial communities that convert organic waste into high-value oleochemicals for industries like agriculture, food, manufacturing, and cosmetics.
A huge shoutout to our incredible scientific leadership team, staff scientists, AC members, grant holders, and everyone in our expanding community that is working towards a materially better future. Wishing you all a peaceful holiday season and looking forward to another amazing year ahead!