Golden, CO, July 22, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 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 artificial intelligence (AI), supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.
DOE’s National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) received 12 project awards from the Genesis Mission’s Phase I request for application (RFA), extending the laboratory’s work on promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities.
“With this funding, NLR will develop AI technologies that will improve the efficiency of automated experimentation, reduce the cost of simulations that guide the design of critical energy structures for longevity, and improve predictive capabilities for water resources, among other important areas,” said Jud Virden, NLR director. “These capabilities and partnerships are critical to our ability to reliably advance and scale energy sources and infrastructure and reduce reliance on imported critical materials.”
NLR is leading four projects that received funding:
- AI-Enabled Flow-Induced Vibration (FIV) Modeling in partnership with the California Institute of Technology
- Autonomous Identification of Semiconductor Charge Transport Physics in partnership with Lila Sciences
- Turbulence-Microphysics-Land Nexus (TML-Nexus): Unlocking Predictive Power for the Coupled Water Cycle using Weather Foundation Models in partnership with DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility
- Agentic-AI Driven Synthesis of Fuel Cell Catalysts Through Low-Temperature, Controlled Graphitization and Iron Incorporation in partnership with Washington University in St. Louis and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Read more about these projects and the additional eight funded projects that include NLR’s support and partnership on the laboratory’s Genesis Mission webpage.
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.
The National Laboratory of the Rockies is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, operated under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308.
David Glickson National Laboratory of the Rockies 303-275-4097 David.Glickson@nlr.gov
