Alex Hernandez-Garcia
Brief academic bio
I am an incoming assistant professor at the Université de Montréal at DIRO and at Mila (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Yoshua Bengio and Prof. David Rolnick. I defended my PhD thesis in 2020 at the University of Osnabrück, which I started in 2016 with Prof. Peter König, as a fellow of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN NexGenVis. I obtained my B.Sc and M.Sc. at the University Carlos III of Madrid and I have been a visiting PhD student at the University of Cambridge with Dr. Tim Kietzmann and at the Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging with Dr. Serge Dumoulin.
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Current projects
At Mila, I research machine learning methods for accelerating scientific discoveries to tackle the climate crisis. Currently, my focus is on developing generative methods, such as GFlowNets, and active learning algorithms for materials and drug discovery. In particular, I am working on multi-fidelity active learning methods, crystal structure generation, electrocatalyst design or molecular conformation sampling. I am also leading the development of a GFlowNet python library, together with many collaborators. With Victor Schmidt, Sasha Luccioni and larger wonderful team, I also helped create ThisClimateDoesNotExist.com, a website to help us visualise the impacts of climate change in our own backyard.
Broader research interests
Besides developing potentially impactful machine learning applications, I am also interested in brain-inspired deep learning and computational neuroscience. I believe that machine learning and neuroscience can highly benefit each other and I am interested in exploring and exploiting their synergies.
My vision of science
Besides my research, I am a strong proponent of open science in the broadest sense, and I try to contribute to it with my actions and by getting involved in discussions about how to make science more inclusive, equitable, open, reproducible, transparent and environmentally conscious. At Mila, I am a member of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee and a member of the Sustainability Committee. In 2021/2022, I was the elected postdoctoral Lab Representative. At NeurIPS 2021, I co-organised a workshop on pre-registration in machine learning.
Contact
If you are looking for graduate or postdoc positions to work on machine learning for science to have an impact on tackling climate change and health challenges, I’d love to hear from you!
alex.hernandez-garcia at mila.quebec · alexhg at e.email