Chemistry & artificial intelligence

AI with
chemical insight.

Chemist and DPhil student in Statistics at the University of Oxford.

I build agents that reason about molecules and work with experimental evidence to solve real problems in chemistry.

Explore my research
Department of StatisticsOxford Protein Informatics GroupOxford profile

01 / Research

Selected work.

Building the foundations for autonomous chemical research.

2026Preprint

NISPO

Open-source IUPAC name generation tool

An open-source tool for naming molecules, built by a verifier-guided coding agent. NISPO achieved 98.1% round-trip accuracy across 103 million molecules.

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2026Preprint

MolJSON

Molecular Representations for Large Language Models

An explicit molecular graph format for language models. Across 224,055 model responses, MolJSON substantially outperformed common formats on molecular translation, graph reasoning, and generation tasks.

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2026JCIM

ChemIQ

Assessing the Chemical Intelligence of Large Language Models

The first systematic assessment of reasoning models in chemistry. Across 816 questions, ChemIQ showed that LLMs had gained the ability to perform chemical reasoning, including elucidating molecular structures from NMR data.

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2023JCIM

SILVR

Guided Diffusion for Molecule Generation

ACS Editors’ Choice

Inference-time conditioning of an equivariant diffusion model for fragment-based drug design, enabling fragment merging and linker generation without retraining.

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Nicholas Runcie at his University of Edinburgh graduation
Nicholas Runcie, MChemUniversity of Edinburgh

02 / About

Chemist and AI researcher.

I combine expertise in chemistry and AI to develop systems for fully autonomous chemical research.

I’m a DPhil student in the Oxford Protein Informatics Group, based in the Department of Statistics and supervised by Professor Fergus Imrie and Professor Charlotte M. Deane.

My research develops agents that reason about molecular structures, apply chemical theory, and interpret experimental evidence. Working with experimental collaborators in Oxford’s Department of Chemistry, I test these systems on real research problems.

Education
University of EdinburghMChem in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry
Industry
AstraZenecaOne-year industrial placement
Writing on the OPIG blog

03 / Recognition

Talks & awards.

Selected talks

  • 8th Artificial Intelligence in Chemistry Symposium

    Speaker · Churchill College, Cambridge

    2025
  • AI for Pharma: Data, Infrastructure and Algorithms

    Invited speaker · University of Greenwich

    2025
  • LLMs @ Oxford

    Speaker

    2025
  • CECAM Psi-k Research Conference

    Speaker · Berlin

    2023

Awards

  • MGMS Young Modellers' Forum Presentation Prize

    29th Young Modellers' Forum

    2025
  • Class Prize

    Top mark in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry MChem

    2024
  • Forbes Prize

    Best student in Advanced Organic Chemistry

    2023
  • Hamish McNab Memorial Prize

    Top mark in Introduction to Research Methods

    2023

04 / Contact

Get in touch.

For research enquiries and conversations about
agents, chemistry, and scientific discovery.