Stony Brook University researchers awarded $1.6 million in DOE grants to advance AI and science capabilities

Researchers at Stony Brook University have been awarded six federal grants worth more than $1.6 million to study artificial intelligence's potential use across a range of scientific fields, from nuclear physics to atmospheric studies.

The university Wednesday announced the U.S. Department of Energy grants, which are part of a nationwide push to advance science through artificial intelligence, and kick-started by a White House executive order last year establishing The Genesis Mission, a large group of scientists, business leaders, academic institutions and federal agencies.

Nearly $1.44 million of the grant funding will go directly to Stony Brook, largely for three projects being led by university researchers Jan C. Bernauer, Emre Salman and Shikui Chen, according to the school. The researchers will be working alongside Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Indiana University and GE Vernova on the projects, which focus on developing AI systems for the fields of nuclear physics, microelectronics and energy.

"Stony Brook’s selection for multiple Genesis Mission awards validates our position as a national leader in expanding the scope, scale and impact of research in science and engineering by leveraging the powerful tool of artificial intelligence," Stony Brook University President Andrea Goldsmith said in a statement announcing the grants.

Additionally, Nengkun Yu, Anatoly Frenkel and Daniel Knopf, Stony Brook professors of computer science, chemical engineering and atmospheric sciences, respectively, received awards for research led by other institutions.

Yu will be working on an AI-enabled computational physics projects overseen by Johns Hopkins University, while Frenkel and Knopf will be working through Brookhaven National Laboratory: Frenkel on a project to develop artificial intelligence capable of analyzing changes in molten salt chemistry, and Knopf on a project to use artificial intelligence to help atmospheric scientists create specific cloud conditions for study.

The Genesis Mission, created by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in November, brings together 342 institutions, including 20 federal agencies, 142 universities and 157 businesses nationwide for a public-private partnership to advance the nation’s scientific and energy infrastructure, according to the Energy Department.

Representatives from the Department of Energy joined elected officials as well as business university leaders Wednesday in Washington, D.C., for the initiative's first Genesis Mission Summit, and to announce the awarding of 278 grants.

Presenters at the summit invoked historic moments of scientific collaboration like The Manhattan Project and the Apollo missions in discussing the importance of the broader initiative.

More than $5 billion in federal dollars have been committed to the AI-science push, according to the White House.

"America’s greatest scientific achievements have been born of national mobilizations paired with the construction of new institutions," Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a White House statement.

"The Genesis Mission is the next chapter in that tradition, as we work together to harness artificial intelligence for scientific discovery at a scale no one else on the planet can match," Kratsios said.

Bernauer, an assistant professor with Stony Brook’s department of physics and astronomy, said he was honored "to be on the frontier" of artificial intelligence and scientific advancement as part of collaborative national initiative.

"It’s certainly a great feeling and I’m very thankful," he said.

Bernauer's research, which was awarded $750,000 and is set to begin as early as Aug. 1, centers on developing AI tools capable of identifying and analyzing the movements of particles in an effort to save nuclear physicists valuable time in conducting experiments.

While he said the proposed work doesn't have immediate commercial applications, its goal helps fundamentally advance both the capabilities of artificial intelligence and the boundaries of nuclear physics research in the future.

"If you really want to harness this new technology, you really have to understand it," Bernauer said of the Genesis Mission. "There’s some kind of feeling of duty to do the right thing with that money."