Department of Energy selects ORNL to lead nine Genesis Mission projects

The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists will lead nine and contribute to an additional 32 projects of the Genesis Mission, which aims to transform science in the U.S.

DOE announced the awards July 22 at the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C. The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by DOE, which is building the world's most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, the Genesis Mission is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.

The projects that ORNL will lead focus on critical issues of national interest, such as fusion energy, critical minerals, water for energy, next-generation materials and manufacturing and new computing and networking strategies.

"These nine Genesis Mission projects showcase what ORNL does best, which is bring together world-class teams, transformative technologies and unique research facilities to tackle problems that matter to the nation," ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer said. "By integrating AI with rigorous scientific workflows, our teams will test new methods for accelerating discovery and determine what it takes to scale those capabilities for broad impact."

The goal of each DOE-supported Genesis Mission project is to identify promising pathways toward transformative science capabilities and to establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.

The nine ORNL-led Genesis Mission awards will address the following national priorities:

• AI-assisted fusion power plant designs, led by Katarzyna (Kate) Borowiec to develop an AI platform that will integrate high-performance computing tools and robotic system design.
• Low-energy AI for scientific discovery, led by Prasanna Date to leverage neuromorphic computing to analyze scientific data at unprecedented rates and scales with lower costs and higher speeds than conventional AI while maintaining equivalent accuracy.
• AI-accelerated materials development and advanced manufacturing applications, led by Stephen DeWitt and driven by Pipit, an AI-based "foundation model factory" that will create custom foundation AI models that U.S. industry can leverage.
• AI-enabled discovery of rare earth elements, led by Xin Gu to assist in exploration of materials essential for energy technologies, advanced manufacturing and national supply chain security.
• AI-powered operations for self-driving science research, led by Mariam Kiran to coordinate network traffic among agentic and scientific workflows across institutional boundaries.
• AI foundation model development for water forecasting, led by Dan Lu to improve prediction of surface and groundwater systems across the continental U.S.
• Modeling soil processes with AI, led by Benjamin Sulman to increase understanding of underground biogeochemical cycles.
• AI-driven Earth system prediction, led by Dali Wang to forecast water availability, streamflow and river temperature weeks to years in advance, supporting hydropower and thermoelectric operations in the Tennessee Valley Authority region.
• AI for next-generation fusion materials development, led by Ying Yang to link processing, microstructure and performance that will accelerate deployment of next-generation structural alloys for reliable operation in nuclear fusion power plants.

ORNL researchers will participate in 32 additional Genesis Mission projects led by other national laboratories, universities and industry partners, addressing a range of national challenges. Additional information on each project is available here.

ORNL also provides foundational support to the Genesis Mission through the American Science Cloud, the secure, federated and science-optimized cloud environment that integrates DOE's world-leading computing and experimental facilities, data resources and high-performance networks across DOE's 17 national laboratories. At the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, installation is also under way on Lux, an AI supercomputer made possible by a co-investment of AMD and DOE. Lux will be completed this year, enabling users to dramatically accelerate AI-driven research.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE's Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.