The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced funding for the first Genesis Mission awards, a nationwide portfolio of research projects that will help develop artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled scientific workflows to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, discovery science, and national security, and address challenges in nuclear energy, critical mineral extraction, intelligent chip design, and commercial fusion energy.
Berkeley Lab will lead 13 new Genesis Mission projects, including Digital Twins for Fusion Magnet Systems, which is being led by the Berkeley Center for Magnet Technology, a joint initiative of Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) and Engineering Divisions. With research partners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fermi National Laboratory, and Florida State University, this collaborative effort will develop AI-enabled digital twins to establish a credible path toward the reliable operation of high-temperature superconducting magnets and support future compact magnetic confinement fusion power plants.
Pending final funding agreements between lead organizations and DOE, Berkeley Lab will also partner on 32 additional Genesis Mission projects being led by other national labs, universities, and companies across the country. Researchers in PSA’s ATAP and Nuclear Science Divisions will engage in nine of these partnerships in the following five research focus areas:
Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing & Industrial Productivity
- AI-accelerated digital twin for REBCO coated conductor manufacturing in superconducting fusion magnet systems – Led by Florida State University (Berkeley Lab PI: Jean-Francois Croteau, ATAP Division)
Accelerating Delivery of Fusion Energy
- Autonomous Implosion Design and Experimental Co-piloting via Physics-Grounded Agentic AI – Led by University of Rochester (Berkeley Lab PI: Remi Lehe, ATAP Division)
- Facility-Level Agentic AI for Portable LaserNetUS Diagnostics and Interoperable Device Integration – Led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab PI: Axel Huebl, ATAP Division)
Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery
- Denoising Quantum Sensors: Agentic Algorithm Creation and Real-Time AI for Quantum-Enabled Rare Event Discovery – Led by UC San Diego (Berkeley Lab PI: Brian Fujikawa, Nuclear Science Division)
Enhancing Particle Accelerators for Discovery
- AI/ML Resonance control for high-reliability, low-cost accelerator operations – Led by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Berkeley Lab PI: Dan Wang, ATAP Division)
- Self-Optimizing Digital Twin for Compact Laser Plasma Accelerator Driven Light Sources – Led by Inversion Semiconductor Inc. (Berkeley Lab PI: Samuel Barber, ATAP Division)
- Digital Twins for Laser-Plasma Wakefield Acceleration: From Plasma Channel Formation to Beam Optimization – Led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab PI: Carl Schroeder, ATAP Division)
- AI-Enabled Digital Twin for Near-Real-Time Optimization and Decision Support of Fusion NBI Systems – Led by Realta Fusion, Inc. (Berkeley Lab PI: Remi Lehe, ATAP Division)
Unifying Physics from Quarks to the Cosmos
- Enabling Rare Event Discovery with Surrogate Modeling and Simulation AI Agents – Led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Berkeley Lab PI: Alan Poon, Nuclear Science Division)
These awards are in addition to the funding PSA received in December 2025, in support of Berkeley Lab’s artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts, for research spanning nuclear science, high-energy physics, and accelerator and detector technologies, and reflecting the Area’s growing leadership in applying AI to complex scientific data, real-time systems, and large-scale infrastructure.
