Carnegie Mellon University said on July 22 it will lead three projects selected for funding through the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission, and will also contribute to five other projects led by partner institutions.
Genesis Mission is a DOE-led national initiative that aims to build the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform.
More than a dozen Carnegie Mellon scholars and researchers will work with researchers, partners and collaborators at DOE national laboratories and other universities. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate artificial intelligence with scientific investigation. They will evaluate whether the approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.
“The Genesis Mission represents a bold new model for scientific discovery — one that brings together government, academia, industry and philanthropy — to tackle challenges no single institution can solve alone,” Carnegie Mellon President Farnam Jahanian said. “Carnegie Mellon University is thrilled to join our collaborators in the national laboratory system and higher education to leverage AI-powered capabilities that will define the next era of discovery and strengthen our nation’s research enterprise for generations to come.”
The projects will address national priorities such as securing critical mineral supply chains, advancing autonomous scientific laboratories. and infrastructure for the world’s largest astronomy experiments.
Herman Herman, director of Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center in the university’s Robotics Institute, will lead a project developing AI tools that let autonomous laboratories with different equipment work together as a single connected research network.
Artur Dubrawski, Alumni Research Professor of Computer Science in the Robotics Institute, will head a separate project building an AI framework aimed at transforming how critical minerals are discovered.
A third project, led by Rachel Mandelbaum, head of CMU’s Department of Physics and a member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics, will bring together researchers from the University of Washington and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to build AI-enabled infrastructure that makes it easier for scientists to combine and analyze data from some of the world’s largest astronomy experiments.
These Genesis Mission projects build on a separate $20 million investment from the U.S. National Science Foundation in CMU’s AI Science Foundry, announced to help construct a national network of autonomous laboratories. Together, the efforts aim to create shared infrastructure that speeds up scientific discovery and reinforces U.S. leadership in the field.