Fall Seminar 2025: Sam Norwood and Sabrina Shen

Mirror is an AI company specializing in computational scientific discovery. We design intelligent systems to automate scientific research, integrating physics simulation, grounded reasoning, and laboratory autonomy. Our goal is to accelerate technological development by putting advanced capabilities for executing the scientific process into the hands of researchers and engineers worldwide.

Frontier AI systems are increasingly able to address the core functions of observation, analysis, and translation in chemistry and materials science. In this seminar, we will present our perspective on the design of scientific AI for deployment in industrial contexts, and showcase how the technologies we work on can enable progress in applications from semiconductor manufacturing to protein design.

Prior to founding Mirror, Sam was a Marie Curie research fellow based in Copenhagen, where he developed generative models for statistical physics and materials chemistry. He received his bachelor’s degree in 2019 from Johns Hopkins with a dual major in chemical & biomolecular engineering and materials science & engineering, and his master’s degree in materials science & engineering in 2020 from the same institution, where he wrote his thesis on machine learning for the optimization of catalyst materials.

Sabrina is a materials scientist with broad training in computational and experimental methods for multi-scale materials design. Before joining the team at Mirror, Sabrina earned her Ph.D. in materials science & engineering from MIT in 2024, where her work on bio-based materials design and manufacturing was supported by fellowships from MathWorks and NSF GRFP. Sabrina received her bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2019.