The initiative supported by the Simons Foundation will accelerate breakthroughs at the intersection of artificial intelligence and astrophysics
The McWilliams Center for Cosmology & Astrophysics at Carnegie Mellon University has received funding from the Simons Foundation’s Targeted Grants to Institutions to launch the Keystone Astronomy & AI (KAAI) Visiting Fellows Program, an international, mentored, postdoctoral initiative designed to advance the creative and substantive use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cosmological and astronomical research.
KAAI Fellows will participate in a monthlong residency at the McWilliams Center for Cosmology & Astrophysics, where a visiting fellow is paired with two mentors — one in astrophysics and one in AI or statistics — to tackle high-impact problems at the intersection of astronomy and machine learning. Each residency culminates in a hands-on workshop that shares software, datasets and workflows with the broader community. The program aims to cultivate a globally connected cohort of researchers fluent in both astrophysics and modern machine learning while accelerating discovery in this data-rich scientific landscape.
The initiative also provides meaningful opportunities for Carnegie Mellon graduate students, who collaborate with visiting fellows, contribute to shared tools and workflows, and gain direct experience while applying AI to frontier problems in astrophysics.
“AI is changing how we do science, and astronomy is where its impact will be felt first and fastest,” said Tiziana Di Matteo, director of the McWilliams Center and the primary investigator on this program. “With KAAI Fellows, we’re turning the McWilliams Center’s cross-disciplinary strength into a global training engine — bringing visiting scholars together with our machine-learning and astrophysics teams to develop methods that move the field and the way science is done.”
The McWilliams Center fosters collaboration within Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Physics, the School of Computer Science, and the Department of Statistics & Data Science, and among partner institutions including the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh.
A key to the program’s strength is the deep cross-disciplinary collaboration among researchers at the McWilliams Center, the Department of Machine Learning, the Department of Statistics & Data Science, and the STAtistical Methods for the Physical Sciences Research Center (STAMPS), whose combined expertise forms the backbone of KAAI’s interdisciplinary model.
McWilliams researchers are developing the data science tools needed to process this immense stream of information into scientific breakthroughs that advance astrophysics and enable new technologies in fields like AI, imaging and data infrastructure on Earth.
The KAAI Fellows program will support six visiting fellows for a month each over the next three years. Applications will be open later this spring.
Visiting fellows will be selected for projects that integrate AI with theoretical and computational astrophysics, particularly in areas such as large scale simulations, computational modeling and data intensive analysis. By pairing each fellow with dual Carnegie Mellon mentors the program fosters deep cross disciplinary collaboration between domain scientists and AI experts.
Barnabás Póczos, associate professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Machine Learning, will serve as the program’s AI/ML director. A member of the McWilliams Center, Póczos collaborates with other faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students on shared code, data and computational tools.
“It is exciting to see how the newly developed machine learning methods are transforming the way we approach science,” Póczos said. “In astrophysics particularly, these tools are reshaping how we explore vast and complex datasets, enabling us to extract subtle signals, identify rare and interesting events, accelerate scientific simulations, and test physical theories at unprecedented scale. By augmenting human intuition with data-driven discovery, machine learning has the potential to dramatically accelerate our understanding of the universe and uncover phenomena that would otherwise remain hidden.”
Carnegie Mellon’s Machine Learning Department shares a long history of close collaboration with the McWilliams Center for Cosmology, combining expertise in machine learning, statistical inference, and large-scale computation with deep domain knowledge in astrophysics. These sustained partnerships created impactful, collaborative research at the intersection of machine learning and cosmology and continue to play a central role in advancing data-driven discovery in the physical sciences.
Fellows will leave the program with demonstrated experience applying trustworthy AI to frontier astrophysics and with durable connections that extend beyond astronomy.
A core component of the fellowship is knowledge dissemination. At the end of each visit, each KAAI Fellow will co organize a weeklong, hands on workshop showcasing cutting edge AI methods for astronomy. These workshops will help accelerate the adoption of new tools across the international research community, ensuring the advanced approaches spread well beyond individual projects or institutions. Designed for maximum impact, they also will cultivate a global network of researchers skilled in applying state-of-the art techniques to fundamental questions about the universe.
“We’re working to develop a global community of international experts in subfields related to AI and astronomy,” Di Matteo said. “Supported by Simons, the workshops will bring together experts from machine learning and astronomy to drive the field forward.”
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