UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State was awarded $20 million by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead one of 20 teams across the country over the next four years as part of the federal government’s Genesis Mission, a national effort to harness AI for scientific discovery. Each team will develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled programmable cloud laboratory (PCL), or node, that together form a network capable of testing, scaling and demonstrating new approaches for advancing automated science and engineering that can expand on human expertise, with the goal of driving discoveries and innovations across disciplines.
NSF invested $380 million nationwide for the first phase of this effort, with an additional $20 million matched in philanthropic contributions from the Astera Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating discovery and particularly committed to updating publishing practices to improve the scientific community’s ability to access and utilize new findings. The awarded teams represent a wide range of disciplines, with the aim of advancing each field and AI at large.
Penn State’s team, led by Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Joan Redwing, will collaborate with 20 industry and institutional partners, including Argonne National Laboratory, on “PCL Test Bed: LATTICE: Layered and Thin-film Technologies with Intelligent Cloud Experimentation.” The LATTICE PCL will focus on establishing a next-generation, AI-enabled research infrastructure for thin-film materials discovery, characterization, optimization and development. Thin-film materials including semiconductors and related materials are used to build the chips that power cell phones, computers and much more, as well as other electronic and quantum technologies.
“This award gives us a unique opportunity to reimagine how materials research is conducted,” Redwing said. “By combining artificial intelligence, cloud technologies and advanced thin-film synthesis, we're building a next-generation laboratory that researchers can access from anywhere and that will dramatically accelerate the discovery and development of materials for future semiconductor and quantum technologies.”
According to Penn State Senior Vice President for Research Andrew Read, the LATTICE PCL will build on the University’s existing state-of-the-art user facilities for thin-film synthesis, materials characterization and community-focused data infrastructure.
“Penn State is No. 1 in the country for materials science, according to NSF’s most recent Higher Education and Research Expenditures Survey, which provides a clear measure of institutional strength and capacity for innovation,” Read said, noting that Penn State hosts particularly robust expertise in thin-film synthesis. “The LATTICE PCL will both make use of and expand upon the multiple top-tier facilities at Penn State to enable reproducible, scalable and distributed materials research that strengthens U.S. leadership in semiconductor, quantum and advanced materials innovation.”
Redwing, who currently serves as director of the NSF 2D Crystal Consortium Materials Innovation Platform facility in the Materials Research Institute at Penn State, noted that advances in thin-film materials and related technologies increasingly rely on atomic-scale engineering precision and wafer-scale uniformity — but achieving this level of control remains a significant bottleneck. She explained that recent progress in AI, real-time sensing and automated control now makes it possible to reconceptualize previous approaches by harmonizing data standards, coordinating multi-instrument workflows and enabling collaborative access for geographically dispersed users.
The national PCL Test Bed network aims to provide remotely accessible capabilities to run custom, user-programmed AI-enabled workflows and help bring innovations in AI and automation into practical use.
"The NSF Programmable Cloud Laboratories initiative will unlock new discoveries in a wide range of fields while also advancing AI-enabled technologies that form the backbone of the automated science revolution," said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF assistant director for technology, innovation and partnerships in a press release. "These awards represent a significant step toward achieving a virtuous cycle of automated hypothesis generation, autonomous experimentation and generation and interpretation of large volumes of high-quality experimental data to drive the next set of hypotheses, all with researchers and students alongside the automated systems at every step of the way."
Co-principal investigators on the project are Stephanie Law, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State, and Yufei Ding, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Law was also recently named the lead investigator on another Genesis Mission project.
In addition to Penn State and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the collaborating institutions are Carnegie Mellon University, Colorado State University, George Mason University, Keyon College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan Technological University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The University of Utah, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, Campostella Research and Consulting, CVD Equipment Corporation, Radiation Monitoring Devices, RENCI, Gatan Inc., k-Space Associates and Staib Instruments.