Columbia University Projects Receive Genesis Mission Funding

Three projects led by Columbia University professors have received Genesis Mission funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The mission aims to integrate artificial intelligence into transformative scientific discovery, with the goal of doubling the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.

Kyle Bishop, professor of chemical engineering; Norman Christ, Ephraim Gildor Professor of Computational Theoretical Physics; and Kara Lamb, associate research scientist in the department of earth and environmental engineering, will receive awards.

“We are proud of the researchers whose projects have been selected for Genesis Mission awards through a highly competitive process,” said Jeannette Wing, Columbia’s executive vice president for research. 

The Genesis Mission unites DOE National Labs, industry, academia, and other partners to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.

“The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation’s scientific enterprise. The remarkable number of high-quality proposals we received demonstrates that America’s innovation pipeline is strong, and it points to even greater opportunities for future investment and continued expansion of the Genesis Mission portfolio,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in a news release announcing the awards.

Columbia’s awardees have wide-ranging projects:

Bishop will develop an AI-enabled physical operating system for bio-programmable matter. Christ will use AI to speed up simulations of the nuclear force, the fundamental force that holds the quarks in an atomic nucleus together. Lamb will use AI and real-world observations to build much better computer models of clouds and precipitation, and to understand how confident those models are in their predictions.

Columbia University researchers and professors Kara Lamb, Tanvir Ahmed Khan, Ben Zhu, Georgia Karagiorgi, Sebastian Will, and William Allen Zajc are also partnering on additional projects that received Genesis Mission funding and are led by other institutions. These include projects led by Brookhaven National Laboratory; Cornell University; Duke University; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Lehigh University; and the City University of New York (CUNY).

“These projects reflect both the strength and breadth of Columbia research in lighting up scientific discovery through AI, and our collaborative spirit in working with national labs, industry, and other universities,” Wing said.