The Translational Data Analytics Institute is commending Xia Ning, Huan Sun, and the rest of their female-led PhD team on their paper titled “G²Retro as a two-step graph generative models for retrosynthesis prediction”, published in 2023.  This piece of work has been selected in Nature's special collection of Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. This is a collection in which Nature selects high-impact research, review, and opinion articles from all its participating journals to celebrate “the direct contributions by the [Nobel Prize] awardees and the advances they have inspired.” In the G²Retro paper, Ning, Sun, and their team were able to develop AI methods to generate synthetic paths for any given molecules – a direct contribution to AI for Science (i.e., Chemistry), following the footsteps of John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton.

Additionally, the G²Retro work is a collaboration among BMI of COM (Xia), CSE of CoE (Xia & Huan), College of Pharmacy (Xia & James), and TDAI (Xia & Huan). It was started under the support of the President’s Research Excellence Award in 2021 as a new, interdisciplinary collaboration. It truly represents the collaborative efforts across multiple disciplines on campus and demonstrates the far-reaching impacts that interdisciplinary research and AI can make.