Oden Institute Faculty Selected for Four Projects in Department of Energy's AI-for-Science "Genesis Mission"

Projects bring scientific AI to rare earth minerals, fusion reactors, additive manufacturing, and nuclear energy.

Five faculty with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin are among the teams playing a leading role in the recently awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, an initiative working to harness artificial intelligence for advances in energy dominance, discovery science and national security. Recipients were announced at a Summit in Washington, D.C., on July 22. Oden Institute faculty will be contributing to four projects that address national priorities in the areas of rare earth minerals, digital twins for fusion energy reactors, additive manufacturing, and digital twins for efficient nuclear energy.

"UT Austin brings together world-class strengths in both energy and AI, along with the national-lab partnerships and computing power to match,” said Fernanda Leite, vice president for research. “We're ready to work alongside the national labs and our partners to drive discoveries that strengthen America's energy security and keep the country competitive." 

According to the Department of Energy, the Genesis Mission is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy, the goal is to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.  

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. 

UT is part of a team that has been awarded the only Phase II Genesis Mission award announced so far.  

• Kevin Clarno, affiliated faculty member of the Oden Institute and associate professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, will lead a team of eight UT faculty as part of the Prometheus project, a $60 million effort (subject to appropriations) led by the Idaho National Laboratory to reduce the time and cost of developing nuclear energy. Building on their earlier work funded by the state of Texas, Clarno and his Prometheus team, which includes Oden Institute faculty Omar Ghattas and Karen Willcox, will contribute expertise in AI and nuclear reactor digital twin technologies.

“This is a great win for the advancement of commercial nuclear reactors through the use of AI and digital twins and UT is honored to be one of only four universities on a team composed of incredible national laboratories and industry partners. UT will be leveraging the nuclear reactor, along with its digital twin, that operate daily in Austin to demonstrate how AI can improve performance and safety. The vision of leadership in the state of Texas provided the funding in 2023 that enabled UT to gain a technical advantage in nuclear digital twins that has enabled this success and partnership,” said Clarno.

In addition to the Phase II project awarded, Oden Institute professors Dima Kozakov, George Biros and Karen Willcox at the Oden Institute are among the teams that will work on the following Phase I Genesis Mission projects: 

• George Biros, principal faculty member at the Oden Institute and professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, will develop AI tools that predict how metals form their internal structure as they cool and harden, enabling additive manufacturing for metal parts and putting powerful foundation models in the hands of the US industrial base. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is leading this project.
• Karen Willcox, director of the Oden Institute and professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, will help create AI-powered digital twins that follow the components inside a fusion energy reactor from design through years of service, so those parts can be built and trusted to survive extreme heat, radiation and chemical stress. This project is led by Sandia National Laboratories.
• Dima Kozakov, principal faculty at the Oden Institute and professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences is a co-investigator on the project led by Benjamin Keitz, associate professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering. The team will collaborate with Sandia National Laboratories to combine high-throughput lab experiments with AI to design proteins that can selectively grab rare earth elements from ores, recycled materials and other sources. These rare earth elements are hard-to-source metals essential to modern energy technologies. In addition to Keitz and Kozakov, the following UT Austin faculty will collaborate on this project: Andrew Ellington (Molecular Biosciences), Manish Kumar (Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering), and Venkat Ganesan (Chemical Engineering). For Kozakov, the work builds on his group's leadership in physics-aware AI for molecular modeling and expands these methods to critical materials and energy applications. He will make extensive use of the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s resources for large-scale AI model training and physics-aware AI.  

The Department of Energy received more than 5,000 applications and awarded funding to 278 projects led by national laboratories, institutions of higher education, companies, and nonprofit organizations. 

Read the UT press release announcing all awards here.