Alexander Rogers

Alexander Rogers is an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow in Chemical Engineering at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on data-efficient artificial intelligence for (bio)chemical and formulation engineering, combining machine learning with physical knowledge to accelerate process and product design. His current fellowship in close collaboration with Unilever, develops chemical AI foundation models for multicomponent formulations and integrates these with process models to enable concurrent formulation and manufacturing-process-aware inverse design.

Alexander first joined the ICSE Research Group as an MEng student, working on transfer learning, physics-informed neural networks and hybrid modelling for bioprocesses. This research led to keynote and oral presentations at several of Europe’s largest conferences in biochemical engineering and computer-aided process engineering. Under Dr Zhang’s supervision, he graduated top of his cohort, receiving the E.T. Woodburn Graduation Prize for Best MEng Thesis and the University of Manchester MEng Course Prize.

His PhD, “Data-Efficient Artificial Intelligence for Chemical System Design: From Process Model Discovery to Molecular Inverse Design,” focused on extracting physical and process knowledge from limited industrial datasets. In collaboration with Unilever, he pioneered generalisable approaches to formulation-process modelling, including intelligent model-based design of experiments for automatic mechanistic model discovery and automated model adaptation for knowledge transfer across products, operating conditions and manufacturing scales. Alongside his PhD, Alexander worked with Croda on physics-informed soft sensing and reaction-kinetics tools for industrial polymerisation and polyesterification processes. His research then extended into chemical language and graph-to-graph foundation models for surfactants, multi-property prediction and generative-AI for inverse molecular design.

His work has been recognised through an SCI Scholarship, the CPACT Malcolm McIvor Prize, and an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship.