Featured Initiative

Unleash advanced materials and molecular breakthroughs

The Acceleration Consortium deploys self-driving labs to spur discoveries for more eco-friendly products, green energy, and cutting-edge health care.

A woman wears goggles, gloves and a mask. She is connecting looping wires between different parts of a machine.

Innovation in advanced materials holds the key to creating biodegradable plastics, environmentally friendly electronics, green energy production and storages, more resilient building materials, new drugs and therapeutics, and breakthroughs in regenerative medicine—and it is estimated to become a $1 trillion industry. The challenge is that advanced materials innovation is incredibly slow and expensive. It typically takes 20 years and up to $100 million to develop, test, and commercialize new materials.

By creating these new materials, the Acceleration Consortium will help improve the lives of Canadians by addressing challenges in health, climate change, urbanization, and economic development. The AC’s efforts will also directly support our country’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery by generating commercialization opportunities, onshoring manufacturing, increasing productivity, and even sparking the creation of companies and industries that do not yet exist.

Ed Clark, board chair at the Vector Institute and former president and CEO of TD Bank Group

U of T’s Acceleration Consortium (AC) will revolutionize advanced materials science and innovation, reducing the time and cost to develop new materials to as little as one year and $1 million. The AC’s approach combines techniques from AI, robotics, chemistry, and other fields to create self-driving labs that autonomously predict, synthesize, test, and refine novel materials with properties we need. U of T is already a global leader in machine learning and has world-class talent in AI, robotics, chemistry, engineering, and medicine. To champion this novel approach, the AC is establishing a global network of leading research talent, entrepreneurs, industry partners, investors, philanthropists, and government agencies.

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Join us to support this game-changing initiative and help spur the creation of advanced materials for more environmentally friendly products, green energy, and better medicine.

Support the Acceleration Consortium

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Explore related campaign priorities: Create a sustainable future Drive scientific discovery Power innovation & entrepreneurship

To learn more about how you can support this novel approach to developing materials the world urgently needs, please contact Institutional Strategic Initiatives Advancement.

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