A group built around curiosity and collaboration.

Dr Sam Parkinson

Dr Sam Parkinson is a Tenure-Track Research Fellow at Aston University and leads the Synthesis, Automation & Materials (SAM) Group within the Aston Institute for Membrane Excellence (AIME). His research sits at the interface of polymer chemistry, automation and data-driven materials discovery, with a particular focus on developing new ways to design, synthesise and understand functional and sustainable polymer materials. Sam completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Leeds, where his research developed expertise across controlled radical polymerisation, including RAFT and ATRP, flow chemistry, advanced polymer characterisation and data-driven reaction optimisation. This work established a long-standing interest in how chemical synthesis can be combined with engineering, automation and computational tools to explore complex reaction and materials spaces more efficiently. He subsequently joined the University of Birmingham as a postdoctoral researcher in the O'Reilly group. His research there focused on polymer synthesis, self-assembly and polymer nanoparticles, including the development of flow and automated approaches for controlling polymerisation and nanostructure formation. This work increasingly brought together polymer chemistry with high-throughput experimentation and machine learning, laying the foundations for his current interest in autonomous materials discovery. Sam later moved to the University of Liverpool, working within the Materials Innovation Factory and the Cooper group. Here, his research expanded further into chemical automation and self-driving laboratories, integrating automated synthesis, online and automated characterisation, flow chemistry and machine-learning-guided experimental design. This experience reinforced his interest in developing experimental platforms in which synthesis, measurement and decision-making are connected within iterative closed-loop workflows. In his current position at Aston University, Sam has established an independent research programme spanning sustainable polymer synthesis, polymer self-assembly, membrane-related materials and autonomous experimentation. A central theme of the SAM Group is understanding how molecular design and synthetic conditions translate into macroscopic material properties, and using automation and data-driven methods to accelerate that understanding.