Daniel Marrujo continues his tour of Brookhaven National Laboratory with a stop at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), where interim director Kevin Yager breaks down the science of building materials at the nanometer scale, from carbon nanotubes to self-assembling DNA structures. Yager also outlines CFN’s vision for an “exocortex,” a network of AI agents designed to accelerate scientific discovery by handling literature reviews, running instruments, and troubleshooting experiments alongside human researchers. The conversation then shifts to the Quantum Material Press, where Dr. Suji Park demonstrates how twisting stacked two-dimensional materials at precise angles can unlock entirely new properties, including superconductivity.
Scientists working at the frontier of nanoscience face a growing bottleneck: the sheer number of tools, datasets, and processes required to push research forward outpaces what any one person can manage alone. Yager describes this burden directly, explaining how researchers are pulled in every direction, reading publications, writing software, running physical instruments, even as the value of their work depends on deep, sustained focus. Meanwhile, at the QPress, Park’s team faces a parallel challenge: identifying which combinations of ultra-thin materials, stacked at which angles, will produce useful new properties out of a nearly infinite set of possibilities.
CFN’s answer is a layered system of specialized AI agents that take on individual pieces of the research process, from surfacing relevant publications to operating lab instruments via natural language, freeing scientists to focus on higher-level problems, while the QPress solves its own challenge by giving researchers a rapid, physical way to prototype and test new material combinations without waiting on large-scale production.