The University of Texas at Austin (UT) has won federal support for five research teams via the Genesis Mission, a federal artificial intelligence (AI)-based initiative, with awards administered by the Department of Energy (DOE).
The DOE announced the current round July 22 in Washington, D.C., the same day the White House said it was expanding the initiative with more than $5 billion in federal commitments.
Created by executive order in November 2025, the Genesis Mission is a national effort to apply AI to scientific research. It started inside the DOE and has since expanded to more than 15 federal agencies. Each agency contributes by way of research awards, funding opportunities, scientific datasets and research facilities.
How the Genesis Mission Works
The university leads two of the projects outright. It joins the other three projects as a partner institution, working alongside Sandia National Laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory. The awards run through several UT departments, including chemical engineering, computer science, the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Agencies work collaboratively through the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, which officials describe as shared infrastructure connecting researchers to data, computing power and AI tools. According to officials, applying AI to science requires large volumes of organized data and significant computing power, resources which already exist within the DOE’s national laboratories and across the federal government.
The mission is meant to give agencies a way to utilize that infrastructure to tackle complicated problems together.
Award recipients for this round carry a dual assignment. They must construct research workflows that apply AI to scientific investigation, while also evaluating how those workflows perform against conventional practices. The mission directs researchers to document what changes when AI enters the process, whether that shows up as a faster result, a sharper prediction, a better-run experiment or findings that conventional methods would have missed.
DOE funding by the numbers
The DOE allocated $293 million for this funding round, drawing more than 5,000 applications in total. From that pool, the department selected 278 projects spanning from national laboratories, universities, private companies and nonprofit organizations. UT’s awards fall within that group, though specific funding numbers have not been released.
Projects UT leads
The two projects UT leads point in different directions. One targets materials while the other targets the lab environment itself.
The first project, based in chemical engineering, pairs UT researchers with Sandia to combine high-throughput lab experiments with AI. The goal is designing proteins that selectively capture rare earth elements from ores, recycled material or other sources. Those metals are difficult to source but essential to modern energy technology.
UT’s second project comes out of computer science, where a UT team will build safety-focused robots. The machines include humanoids and dual-armed models with dexterous hands, meant to take over the repetitive or hazardous portions of laboratory experiments.
Projects UT supports as a partner
On the three remaining projects, UT joins as a partner rather than a lead. Two of those run through UT’s Oden Institute, where the work centers on predicting how materials behave before anyone commits to building with them.
Oak Ridge leads the first of those projects. UT researchers on that project will develop AI tools that forecast how metals form their internal structure as they cool and harden, work that supports modern manufacturing of metal parts.
Sandia leads the second project, which will create AI-powered digital twins that mirror components found inside a fusion energy reactor, tracking the hardware from design through years of service. The digital twins are meant to establish whether those parts can survive extreme heat, radiation and chemical stress over time.
The third partner project places UT on Prometheus, a $60 million effort led by Idaho National Laboratory to reduce the time and cost of developing nuclear energy. A team of eight UT researchers will contribute expertise in AI and nuclear reactor digital twin technologies, building on earlier work funded by the state of Texas.
What comes next
The DOE structured its awards in phases, with four of UT’s five falling under Phase I. Prometheus is the only Phase II award announced so far.
Alongside the funding round, federal officials announced a set of National Science and Technology Challenges spanning health care, energy, infrastructure, manufacturing and affordability. Each challenge names a specific problem for federal agencies to work on together, from chronic disease origins to domestic microelectronics.
Several of those challenges cover ground similar to UT’s awards, including a push to build autonomous laboratories that run experiments through robotics and real-time analysis, along with an effort to design new materials with predictable performance.
The DOE expects to name additional Phase II recipients in the fall, according to UT.
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