John Maier
Postdoctoral ResearchAssociate, Chemical and Biomolecular Engr
- Office
- 361 Nieuwland Science Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - jmaier4@nd.edu
Areas of Research
Maier’s current research focuses on expanding the chemical design space through reinforcement learning on Large Property Models (LPMs). By flipping the traditional property prediction task into a chemistry prediction task, he is developing an active learning framework to more effectively model the frontier of property configurations and identify candidate materials. This project aims to drive the discovery of next-generation electronic devices and establish an autonomous materials discovery platform applicable to fields such as energy storage and pharmaceuticals. His work addresses critical bottlenecks in materials innovation by navigating chemical spaces that exceed the reach of conventional scientific intuition.
Biography
Charlie Maier is an SAI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, where he conducts research within the Savoie group. He joined the university following the completion of his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in August 2025. During his doctoral studies under advisor Nick Jackson, he specialized in the development of molecular machine learning models for coarse-grained electronic structure prediction. Maier’s academic background also includes a B.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia, where he was recognized as an Echols Scholar and earned second prize in the Sigma Pi Sigma Undergraduate Research Competition.