Ekin Dogus Cubuk

He earned a BA in physics and BS in engineering at Swarthmore College in 2010, followed by a Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry PhD in applied physics in 2016.⁠[2]

His doctoral work examined structural complexity in disordered solids and catalytic surfaces, combining first-principles calculations, machine learning and stochastic simulation for applications including supercooled liquids and lithium-ion batteries.⁠[3]

After a brief postdoc in Stanford University’s Materials Science Department, he joined Google Brain in 2017, studying large neural networks’ scaling, out-of-domain generalization and materials discovery.⁠[4]

On June 4, he and Barret Zoph introduced AutoAugment, which uses reinforcement learning to select image transformations, probabilities and magnitudes for automated data augmentation. The team also reported transfer of learned policies between vision datasets.⁠[5]

In 2019, he, Barret Zoph and colleagues released the RandAugment preprint, reducing augmentation to a transformation count and shared magnitude without a separate proxy-task search. The NeurIPS 2020 paper evaluated image classification and object detection.⁠[6]

On November 29, he and Amil Merchant presented GNoME, combining graph neural networks with density-functional-theory calculations to predict crystal stability. The team reported 2.2 million candidate structures, including 380,000 on the updated stability hull; these figures are not counts of synthesized materials.⁠[7]

In their April commentary, Anthony K. Cheetham and Ram Seshadri questioned the evidence for combined novelty, credibility and utility, calling for synthesis and crystallographic expertise.⁠[8]

On September 30, Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry announced it was leading Periodic Labs’ $300 million founding round. The announcement described Cubuk and Liam Fedus’s collaboration on AI for science, emphasizing real experimental data.⁠[9]

On September 15, the company introduced Periodic Neon, describing a trillion-parameter model post-trained on its experimental data and deployed in its labs to interpret X-ray diffraction results. Its reported performance comparisons concern that analysis task, not general capability.⁠[10]

Scientific discovery requires experiments, he argues; simulation alone is insufficient.⁠[11]

Periodic Labs: Official website: https://periodic.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ekindogus (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekin-dogus-cubuk-9148b8114/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]