Tian Xie

About

I am a principal research manager and project lead at Microsoft Research AI for Science (opens in new tab). I lead a highly interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and program managers to develop foundational AI capabilities to accelerate the design of novel materials, aiming to impact broad areas including energy storage, carbon capture, and catalysis. I lead the development of MatterGen (opens in new tab), an AI generator that discovers novel materials. Our team also develops MatterSim (opens in new tab), an AI emulator that accelerates the simulation of material properties.

Before Microsoft, I was a postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT from 2020 to 2022, co-advised by Tommi Jaakkola and Regina Barzilay. I got my PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in 2020, advised by Jeffrey C. Grossman. I also did research interns at DeepMind and Google X.

My most noticeable work before Microsoft includes the development of CDVAE (opens in new tab) in 2021, a generative model for materials that significantly surpassing other models at the time, as well as CGCNN (opens in new tab) in 2018, the first graph neural network specifically designed for materials.

See my website at https://txie.me/ (opens in new tab) for more details.