Karthik Sankaranarayanan trained in two quite different scientific subfields as a graduate student and as a postdoctoral researcher. Now at Purdue University, he aims to combine those fields in a project that will use artificial intelligence to plan the synthesis of complex new pharmaceutical agents. “Nature uses enzymes to effortlessly produce her complex small molecules. The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly interested in using enzymes to synthesize molecules that may be challenging to produce using traditional organic chemistry,” said Sankaranarayanan, an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering. With that in mind, he will design an AI algorithm to sift through the diverse set of enzymatic reaction chemistries that nature uses to produce molecules.