About Me
I’m Nathan Johnson, a materials scientist studying advanced manufacturing and automated laboratories.
The main theme of my work is teaching machines to do materials science. In grad school that meant machine learning for metal 3D printing and hauling printed parts to synchrotrons to X-ray them; during my postdoc it meant letting active-learning models decide which alloys to synthesize next. These days it means building self-driving microscopes — instruments that can plan, run, and analyze their own experiments.
When I’m not doing any of that, I like to make videos and write essays about culture, politics, science.
Research Articles I’ve published
Self-Driving Microscopy
- Everything important that I learned in three years of building self-driving microscopes Agentic self-driving microscopy benchmarks support qualification but do not necessarily generalize to unseen tasks, 2026
Machine Learning Driven Materials Design
- A review article I wrote back in grad school about how machine learning assists the field of additive manufacturing Additive Manufacturing, 2020 · invited review
- A short piece on using simple ML models to guide synthesis of thin-film high entropy alloys Materials, 2024
Custom X-ray Instruments and Experiments That I’ve Developed
- Speeding up in situ X-ray tomography experiments using deep learning Materials Characterization, 2026
- A custom experiment for measuring strain in complex 3D printed metal parts Materials Characterization, 2024