Prof. Arthur Mar from University of Alberta, Canada, visited Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter (FJIRSM), Chinese Academy of Sciences on May 17th, 2019. During his stay, Prof. Arthur Mar delivered a speech entitled “Accelerating the Discovery of Solid State Materials: From Traditional to Machine-Learning Approaches”, and carried out detailed discussion with the research staff at FJIRSM. 

Prof. Arthur Mar received a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1992 under the supervision of James A. Ibers; He worked as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Yves Piffard and Jean Rouxel at the Institut des Matériaux de Nantes in 1993–1994. He is currently full Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alberta. He is considered to be one of the leading experts in the field of inorganic solid state chemistry, having established an internationally recognized research program encompassing the synthesis, characterization, and applications of intermetallic compounds and Zintl phases, with an aim to understand structure-property relationships. In recent years, he has been at the forefront of applying machine-learning approaches to materials discovery. He has published over 208 articles and given over 92 invited presentations, and received the Faculty of Science Research award and numerous teaching awards at the University of Alberta. He has previously served on the editorial boards of Chemistry of Materials and Acta Crystallographica, and currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Solid State Chemistry.