Hessam Mehr is a Lecturer in AI for Science and Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, King’s College London. He leads an interdisciplinary research group exploring new paradigms for chemical synthesis and discovery predicated on automation and programmable chemistry; bespoke reaction media and experimental hardware; and cutting-edge computational approaches.

Dr Mehr received his BSc in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, followed by a PhD in Chemistry with a focus on physical organic and supramolecular chemistry under the supervision of Prof Mark MacLachlan (University of British Columbia, Canada). Between 2017 and 2018 he worked as an NMR specialist at Health Canada, after which he started as a post-doctoral researcher in the Cronin Group (University of Glasgow) working on robotics and domain-specific computer languages for automated chemical synthesis and programmable reaction optimisation and discovery.

In 2022, he was awarded the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship with a proposal focused on turning microdroplets into a massively parallel medium for discovering new molecules and reactions. Since then, his research group has published open hardware prototypes and bespoke labware opening up conventional organic synthesis procedures to execution within aerosol microdroplets.

In 2026, he joined King’s College London as a new Lecturer via the King’s Interdisciplinary Science (KIS) programme. His research group is located at the Strand Campus to facilitate collaborations with Engineering and Physics researchers.

Research Interests

• Chemistry in microdroplets
• Inhomogeneous chemical systems
• High-throughput analytical methods
• Programmable chemistry
• Sensors and imaging
• Artificial intelligence in chemistry

PhD Supervision

• Luokun Zhang
• Zehua Li