This computational chemist is experimentalists’ secret weapon in the hunt for new materials

‘We could predict thousands of new materials each day using our software and say which ones of those look good,’ says Kim Jelfs. ‘But if they can’t actually be made in the lab, it’s completely meaningless.’ That viewpoint is central to how the Jelfs group functions. They are very much computational chemists, but rather than work in isolation, they actively embed themselves into experimental studies.