Open Day Garching 2026
Hands-on computational chemistry at the Research Campus Garching Open Day.
At the MDSI / relAI booth with Niccolò Radice and Felix Böhm. © Isabella Almstätter / MDSI
On 3 October 2026 the Research Campus Garching opened its doors for the Open Day, and I joined colleagues from the groups of Prof. Alessio Gagliardi and Prof. Angela Casini at the joint Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI) and relAI booth in the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology.
Together with Niccolò Radice and Felix Böhm, I helped turn our research on finding materials with desired properties — for example high CO₂ absorption — into something visitors could touch and play with. We invited kids and adults to hand-build molecular models from atoms and to look closely at 3D structure models, so abstract chemistry became something you could hold.
We also ran interactive games that mirror how we actually work in computational chemistry: guessing CO₂ absorption sites on different materials, picking where a molecule should attach, and then comparing those choices with predictions from a trained machine-learning model. The aim was not a lecture, but a short, concrete conversation about how simulation and ML help design better materials.
It was a full day of questions from families, students, and curious visitors — exactly the kind of public engagement I enjoy alongside research and scientific illustration. A longer report of the MDSI / relAI presence is on the MDSI news page.
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Photos © Isabella Almstätter / Munich Data Science Institute (MDSI), Technical University of Munich. Used with permission. Event coverage: MDSI