July 24: The University of Colorado Boulder has been selected for six highly competitive grants totaling over Dollar 2.4 million through the United States Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission—serving as lead institution on three and collaborating partner on three.
The project leads and awards are Professor David Bortz of Applied Mathematics (Dollar 750,000); Assistant Professor Yuan Shi of Physics (Dollar729,800); and Associate Professor Keith Ulmer of Physics (Dollar 659,157).
Also, CU Boulder faculty are co-principal investigators on three awards led by other institutions, with over Dollar 320,000 going to CU Boulder. The co-recipients and their awards include Assistant Professor Zhi Li of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, partnering with the University of Maryland (Dollar 32,740); and Professor Jamie Nagle and Associate Professor Dennis Perepelitsa, both of Physics, in partnership with Baruch College (Dollar161,000). Perepelitsa is also a co-recipient on an award in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Dollar127,000).
“These awards reflect the strength of CU Boulder’s research enterprise and our researchers’ ability to build ambitious, interdisciplinary collaborations needed to tackle some of our nation’s most important scientific challenges,” said Massimo Ruzzene, senior vice chancellor for research and innovation and dean of the institutes. “By applying advances in artificial intelligence to world-class research, our teams will help accelerate discovery in ways that will address complex challenges and benefit society.”
The awards also highlight the strength of CU Boulder’s research partnerships, which enable teams to pursue complex scientific challenges that no institution could address alone. They reflect collaborations across scientific disciplines as well as partnerships with industry, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations and universities across the country.
The scientific discovery of the awarded projects involve:
- AI-driven real-time control of the plasma in fusion energy systems — the superheated ionized gas whose behavior must be steered to make fusion a practical source of abundant clean electricity.
- New approaches in quantum computing to simulate plasma, the ionized gas that fuels fusion reactions.
- Extremely fast AI that can handle an enormous rate of data input for discovering new fundamental particles in physics.
- An agentic AI framework that uses large models for hyperlocal water and flood predictions for U.S. energy planning and operations.
- A new AI-driven paradigm for extracting the physics of quark-gluon plasma from high-energy nuclear collisions.
- A massive AI system, called a foundation model, for experimental nuclear physics research in the U.S.
The grants represent communities of CU Boulder scientists, postdoctoral researchers and others—some of whom studied under the awardees, helped develop cutting-edge pathways and went on to national laboratories and other institutions to continue their research.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the Energy Department, 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.
The phase-one Genesis grants were announced at and livestreamed from a Washington, D.C., summit on July 22.