Carnegie Mellon University, working with researchers, partners and collaborators at Department of Energy national laboratories and other universities, will lead three projects selected for funding(opens in new window) through the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Genesis Mission, positioning CMU at the forefront of a national effort to transform how scientific breakthroughs are made. 

Carnegie Mellon researchers will also contribute to five Genesis Mission projects led by partner institutions, extending the university's impact across this ambitious national effort. More than a dozen CMU scholars and researchers will participate in the Genesis Mission initiative. 

Collectively, these projects highlight Carnegie Mellon's strengths in AI, robotics, computing, engineering and interdisciplinary research while addressing national priorities that range from securing critical mineral supply chains and advancing autonomous scientific laboratories to enabling new discoveries about the fundamental nature of the universe. Working with Department of Energy national laboratories and leading research universities, CMU researchers will develop the next generation of AI tools for scientific discovery.

The Genesis Mission projects complement a new $20 million U.S. National Science Foundation investment in CMU’s AI Science Foundry to help build a national network of autonomous labs. Together, these initiatives will create a shared infrastructure to accelerate scientific discovery and strengthen American leadership.

"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,” said CMU President Farnam Jahanian. “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 Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the DOE, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it 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 goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and 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. 

"Carnegie Mellon's defining strength is bringing together expertise across AI, computing, engineering and the sciences to solve problems that no single discipline can address alone," said Theresa Mayer, vice president for research. "These projects exemplify the collaborative, forward-looking research that drives scientific advancement while creating new capabilities that will benefit researchers and society for years to come."

Connecting autonomous laboratories to speed scientific advancement 

CMU researcher Herman Herman(opens in new window), director of Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center in the Robotics Institute at CMU’s School of Computer Science, will lead a project to develop AI-based tools that enables autonomous laboratories with different equipment to work together as a connected research ecosystem. Working with collaborators from Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the team will enable robot-driven autonomous laboratories to share capabilities and conduct complex experiments, dramatically reducing the time required to launch new scientific investigations and scale discoveries across institutions. The platform has the potential to lay the foundation for a new generation of AI-enabled research infrastructure that accelerates experimentation and transforms how science is conducted.

GEM-AI to accelerate discovery of critical minerals

A project led by Artur Dubrawski,(opens in new window) the Alumni Research Professor of Computer Science in the Robotics Institute at CMU’s School of Computer Science, will help to develop an AI framework that could transform how critical minerals are discovered, helping reduce the time, cost and uncertainty of exploration. Working with collaborators at Sandia National Laboratories, Colorado School of Mines and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the team will integrate diverse scientific data to identify promising mineral deposits essential to advanced manufacturing, energy technologies, aerospace and national defense. By making mineral exploration more efficient and precise, the project has the potential to strengthen domestic supply chains and expand access to the resources that underpin the nation's technological and economic competitiveness.

AI infrastructure to accelerate discoveries about the universe 

CMU researchers, led by Rachel Mandelbaum(opens in new window), head of the Department of Physics at CMU’s Mellon College of Science and member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics, with partners from the University of Washington and collaborators from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will develop AI-enabled infrastructure that will make it easier for scientists to combine and analyze data from some of the world's largest astronomy experiments. By creating shared tools that allow researchers and AI systems to seamlessly work across massive, distributed datasets, the project aims to accelerate discoveries about dark matter, dark energy and the evolution of the universe. The resulting infrastructure will support the broader astronomy community, creating a lasting resource that enables new AI-powered approaches to exploring some of science's most fundamental questions. 

CMU researchers are also participating in other Genesis Mission projects. These include:

• Aviral Kumar(opens in new window), assistant professor of computer science and machine learning in the School of Computer Science, will participate in a project led by Brookhaven National Laboratory that will that will develop tools for hypothesis generation in scientific research (along with Max Simchowitz(opens in new window), assistant professor of machine learning and Niloofar Mireshghallah(opens in new window), assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute and Engineering and Public Policy) connect multiple AI agents, each trained on complex scientific tasks such as reading literature and analyzing data, to a network that will generate better research hypotheses than today’s AI models can.
• Graham Neubig(opens in new window), associate professor of computer science in the School of Computer Science, will participate in a project led by Brookhaven National Laboratory that will connect AI models into one continuously improving reasoning system to accelerate discovery and collaboration. 
• Noa Marom(opens in new window), professor of materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering and the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, will participate in a project that will deliver AI-powered discovery of quantum and optoelectronic materials led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 
• Manfred Paulini,(opens in new window) professor of physics and Mellon College of Science associate dean for research, and Matteo Cremonesi(opens in new window), assistant professor of physics in the Mellon College of Science, will participate in a project led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that will perform the first systematic investigation of foundation models applied across multiple energy regimes from nuclear to high-energy physics.
• Chad Schafer(opens in new window), professor of statistics in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Mikael Kuusela(opens in new window), an associate professor also in the Department of Statistics & Data Science in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, will help to develop foundational AI tools to process significant amounts of astronomical data(opens in new window) led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

The awards represent an important investment in research that has the potential to speed scientific productivity, strengthen U.S. innovation and accelerate research in areas ranging from energy and advanced manufacturing to biology and materials science.

National Science Foundation Research at CMU

National Science Foundation support helps Carnegie Mellon researchers across disciplines tackle some of society's most complex challenges. Explore the spotlights below to learn how CMU's NSF-funded research is making an impact.

NSF Spotlights(opens in new window)