6 UK researchers selected for historic DOE ‘Genesis Mission’

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 22, 2026) — As the United States pushes to accelerate innovation, researchers from the University of Kentucky will play a leading role in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission.

Principal investigators:

• Sean Bailey, Ph.D., (Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering), “A Physically Informed Neural Network for Power-Grid Resilience to Extreme Wind Events”
• Chad Risko, Ph.D., (College of Arts and Sciences), “From Edisonian Optimization to Predictive Molecular Design: AI-Driven Discovery and Engineering of Advanced Semiconductor Interfaces”

Co-investigators:

• Savio Poovathingal, Ph.D. (Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering), co-investigator on Bailey’s project
• Erin Peters, Ph.D. (College of Arts and Sciences)
• Renee Fatemi, Ph.D. (College of Arts and Sciences)
• Wolfgang Korsch, Ph.D. (College of Arts and Sciences)

The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy (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.

This coordinated national effort launched in November 2025 to position the U.S. as a global leader in the AI revolution. The mission aims to multiply the return on taxpayer investment while securing national energy dominance. Researchers responded to a Request for Applications (RFA) put out by the DOE with formal proposals.

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.

From more than 5,000 submissions, the selection committee chose:

• 278 projects: 87 led by DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) National Laboratories, 168 led by universities, 19 led by companies, and 4 led by nonprofit organizations.
• 342 participating institutions: 16 DOE and NNSA National Laboratories, 142 universities, 157 companies, 13 nonprofit organizations, and 14 other institutions.

Representatives from UK joined fellow award recipients in Washington, D.C., on July 22, 2026, for the Genesis Mission Summit, which marked the official launch of the initiative’s first cohort.

Advancing Kentucky and the nation

“The selection of our researchers for this national mission demonstrates the University of Kentucky’s role as a leader in solving the most pressing challenges facing our Commonwealth and our country,” said UK President Eli Capilouto. “By harnessing these new, powerful tools, we are advancing the boundaries of science and ensuring that Kentucky remains at the forefront of what might be the most rapid period of innovation in human history.”

The Genesis Mission focuses on building the American Science and Security Platform (ASSP), a dedicated infrastructure designed to provide high-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud-based AI environments and agents. This platform allows for large-scale model training and autonomous experimentation that was previously impossible.

“The Genesis Mission provides a unique opportunity for our faculty to collaborate at the highest levels of federal research,” said Ilhem Messaoudi, Ph.D., UK acting vice president for research. “This initiative integrates state-of-the-art supercomputing with the expertise of our scientists to accelerate the discovery process. We are proud to see UK leading projects that will ultimately strengthen national security and energy dominance.”

Strengthening the power grid

One of the UK-led projects, “A Physically Informed Neural Network for Power-Grid Resilience to Extreme Wind Events,” focuses on the increasing threat severe weather poses to communities and critical infrastructure.

Led by Bailey, the Ervin J. Nutter Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the Pigman College of Engineering, the team will explore how AI can help utility providers better anticipate damaging wind events before they occur.

“The selection of our team for the Genesis Mission reflects the strength of collaborative, interdisciplinary research at UK,” Bailey said. “We are excited to contribute our expertise to a national effort focused on accelerating scientific discovery and developing new approaches to tackle complex scientific challenges.”

Bailey’s team will combine weather data, atmospheric science and AI to develop a tool capable of translating large-scale weather forecasts into highly detailed local predictions that account for terrain, vegetation and the built environment. The approach could help identify areas most vulnerable to extreme wind loading (the total amount of force or pressure that the wind exerts on a structure when it blows against it), thereby improving resilience and reducing disruptions to communities.

“Severe weather events continue to challenge communities in Kentucky and across the nation — affecting agriculture, infrastructure, commerce and public safety,” Bailey said. “This project gives us an opportunity to explore how emerging AI technologies can improve preparedness, strengthen resilience and support efforts to mitigate those impacts.”

Alongside Bailey, the team includes Poovathingal, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and a Lighthouse Beacon Foundation Scholar, Gijs de Boer, Ph.D., of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Environmental Science and Technologies Department, and James Pinto, Ph.D., Jeremy Sauer, Ph.D. and Domingo Muñoz-Esparza, Ph.D., from the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Research Applications Laboratory.

The team will leverage existing weather databases and develop new high-resolution atmospheric simulations to train an AI model grounded in established physics. The project builds on longstanding collaborations between atmospheric scientists and engineers — positioning the team to address the complex challenges associated with forecasting localized extreme wind events.

Evolving semiconductor design

Chad Risko, Ph.D., the John C. Hubbard Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences and affiliated faculty member of the UK Center for Applied Energy Research, is the primary investigator for another project titled “From Edisonian Optimization to Predictive Molecular Design: AI-Driven Discovery and Engineering of Advanced Semiconductor Interfaces.”

This research addresses the role of interfaces — areas where different materials meet — in next-generation microelectronics, optoelectronics, quantum systems and power technologies. Performance and reliability in these systems are often controlled by small changes in interface chemistry.

Current discovery methods for these interfaces rely heavily on “Edisonian” (trial-and-error) screening. Risko’s project aims to replace this process with a closed-loop, physics-guided AI framework that can generate testable scientific hypotheses and guide experiments.

“Our work aims to move away from traditional trial-and-error methods toward predictive design,” Risko said. “By integrating AI into research workflows, we can significantly reduce the time needed to develop the next generation of semiconductor materials, which are vital for everything from biosensors to space-based systems.”

The goal is to reduce the number of synthesis and characterization cycles needed to resolve mechanistic hypotheses by at least 50%.

Synthesis is the phase where researchers actually create a material, such as an ultra-thin chemical layer designed to sit between different parts of a device. Characterization is the subsequent testing phase where they analyze that material to see if it has the right properties, such as how strongly it sticks to other surfaces, or how long it lasts before breaking down. This process can be costly and time-consuming because there are an almost infinite number of chemical combinations to try.

Risko’s team includes Seth Marder, Ph.D., and Stephen Barlow, Ph.D. from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Ph.D., from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University, Addis Fuhr, Ph.D., from the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Joseph Luther, Ph.D., from the Chemistry and Nanoscience Center at the National Laboratory of the Rockies.

Faculty co-investigators

UK’s involvement in the Genesis Mission includes several researchers serving as co-investigators, like Poovathingal, but on grants led by other institutions.

Peters, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the UK Accelerator Laboratory (UKAL), is part of a team led by Louisiana State University that also includes Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Air Force Institute of Technology. The project, titled “Accelerating Nuclear Data Delivery Using AI/ML approaches in High Complexity Data Sets,” plans to use AI to clear a research bottleneck by turning messy readings from nuclear sensors into clear, usable information.

“Our individual contribution to the project is to obtain neutron spectra at the UKAL, which will serve as important training (or truth) data for the AI model that our LSU collaborators will develop,” said Peters.

Fatemi, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Korsch, a professor in the same department, are working on a subcontract from the University of Wisconsin. Their project’s goal is to develop and test next-generation AI foundation models for applications in nuclear and high-energy physics. Other collaborators on the project include researchers from Argonne National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University.

These contributions across engineering, materials science, chemistry and physics cement UK’s position as a trusted partner to laboratories and other top-tier universities — and as a leader in research at a national level.

These projects are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. For more information on the Genesis Mission, visit genesis.energy.gov.