Co-founder of Entalpic

Alexandre Duval

Bio

I am the co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Entalpic, a young french startup at the forefront of AI and Chemistry, working to accelerate the energy transition. Our focus is on discovering new chemicals and materials that lead to more sustainable practices in sectors where the need for change is most urgent. Specifically, we develop a modern generative AI platform to discover new catalysts that optimize targeted chemical reactions, significantly reducing CO2 emissions and thus making a substantial impact on the environment.

Before this, I briefly worked at Amazon on augmenting LLMs with API-Tools and obtained my PhD from CentraleSupelec and Inria Saclay under the supervision of Prof. Fragkiskos Malliaros in April 2024. During my PhD, for two years, I have also been attached to MILA (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Insitute), under the supervision of Prof. David Rolnick and Prof. Yoshua Bengio, as part of the group “AI for Climate Change”.

My research originally spanned the broad field of Graph Machine Learning (Graph ML), i.e. an area of ML which focuses on non-euclidean data (e.g. graphs). After several projects on the explicability of Graph Neural Networks (GNN), graph pooling algorithms and graph-based text summarisation, I bifurcated towards AI4Science projects using Graph ML to accelerate scientific discovery. In particular, I am working on electrocatalyst design to improve the energy efficiency of hydrogen storage, cement production and other energy-intensive industrial processes. This ambitious project involves (1) constructing scalable and expressive symmetry-preserving GNN architectures for materials modelling, (2) combining them with generative methods (e.g. GFlowNets) to both propose and evaluate new catalyst materials in an end-to-end pipeline, (3) integrating the feedback of real-world lab experiments.

In my spare time, I love playing football as well as a wide range of other outdoor activities. I am also a genuine art enthousiast, including painting, cinema and music.

Education

Contact

alexandre.duval@mila.quebec