The LLM Revolution in Materials Science: From Data Extraction to Crystal Design (24/02/26)
Speaker and Affliation:
Prof.Taylor D.Sparks
Professor, Materials Science & Engineering, University of Utah
When?
24th February, 2026 (Tuesday), 03.00 PM (India Standard Time)
Where
KPA Auditorium, Dept. of Materials Engineering, IISc, Bangalore
Abstract:
Large language models are igniting a quiet revolution in how we practice materials science. What began as tools for language and code are rapidly becoming engines for scientific discovery, capable not only of reading our literature, but of designing our materials. In this talk, I trace a new end-to-end paradigm that runs from unstructured text to engineered crystal structures. (1) I begin with KnowMat, our agentic, LLM-driven framework for transforming the materials literature into structured, machine-readable data. KnowMat converts PDFs, tables, and narrative text into validated JSON schemas, enabling automated database construction, large-scale literature mining, and ML-ready datasets with built-in quality control. This shifts data curation from a manual bottleneck into an automated, scalable scientific instrument. (2) I then move from understanding to creation. I introduce CrysText, a framework that uses LLMs to generate full crystallographic information files (CIFs) directly from natural-language prompts. Rather than treating crystal generation as a purely numerical problem, CrysText treats it as a language problem, allowing composition, symmetry, and even thermodynamic stability to be specified in text. With reinforcement learning layered on top, these models learn not just to speak crystallography, but to obey its physics. Together, KnowMat and CrysText define a new closed loop for materials discovery: literature → structured data → generative design → candidate materials. LLMs are no longer just assistants to materials scientists; they are becoming co-designers.
Short Bio of Speaker:
Dr. Sparks is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Utah. He holds a BS in MSE from the UofU, MS in Materials from UCSB, and PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University. He was a Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellow at the University of Liverpool and a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and a speaker for TEDxSaltLakeCity. He is active in TMS, MRS, and ACERS societies. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief for the Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation and the Director of Graduate Affairs for the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering. When he’s not in the lab you can find him running his podcast “Materialism,” creating materials educational content for his YouTube channel, or canyoneering with his 4 kids in southern Utah.