Dr. Nico Fleck, Associate Director, Head of High-Throughput Experimentation & Catalysis, Merck Electronics KGaA
The complexity of scientific questions certainly skyrocketed in the past decades and this trend is certainly fueled by rising capabilities to handle large amounts of data. Thus, experimentation moves away from empirical designs to data-driven approaches in multidimensional parameter spaces. Sampling those spaces requires plentiful, yet efficient, experimentation strategies. Here, automation enters the stage to relieve scientists from tedious tasks and boost their productivity. Concomitantly, automated execution provides digital tools for experimental planning traction in the lab and also allows to capture metadata that escaped the notice of the executor beforehand. Another, oftentimes underrated, benefit of automation is the intrinsic reproducibility, since coworker-dependent actions do not exist anymore and the experiment has to be described in every detail.
The talk will start from a short general perspective on lab automation in the context of HTE and then proof the aforementioned points with actual examples from our labs