Tim Erdmann

Dr. Tim Erdmann is a Staff Research Scientist at IBM Research - Almaden. His primary research interests currently focus on developing software applications that leverage generative AI and large-language models for the domain of chemistry to democratize access to expert tools and AI models.

Dr. Erdmann holds a PhD in Polymer Chemistry from TU Dresden/CFAED (Cluster of Excellence ‘Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden’) with specialization in synthesis and characterization of semiconducting polymers and joined IBM Research end of 2017 through a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship of the Humboldt foundation. In early 2019 while working on conductive polymer-based sensors for VOCs, he discovered his passion for programming and since then followed a self-guided learning path while working with Dr. Jim Hedrick and the team on organocatalytic polymerizations in flow reactors, carbonate monomer synthesis, upcycling of CO2, and automated sol-gel synthesis partly involving AI model training. Since Spring 2023 Tim leads the project IBM ChemChat, an LLM-powered and cloud-native conversational assistant for material science and data visualization deployed on IBM Cloud.