Five flagship University of Arizona research projects have been selected for funding through the U.S. Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, a national initiative announced July 22 that seeks to bring artificial intelligence to bear on some of the country's most urgent challenges in energy, national security, and science. The U of A secured five prime awards, placing it among the top 4% of universities nationwide-only three institutions received more-in a competition that drew 278 awards across 342 participating organizations.
"These awards are a direct result of the intentional work of our faculty and staff who have been building AI into the fabric of how this university operates across research, teaching and learning, and operations," said University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella. "We are confident that AI will advance our ability to move faster from breakthrough to benefit, and that is what awards like these make possible."
The Genesis Mission aims to build the world's most powerful integrated science discovery platform, combining artificial intelligence, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instrument data. The initiative represents a major federal push in AI for Science & Research, bringing together government, industry, academia, and philanthropic partners to test whether AI-enabled scientific workflows can yield faster discoveries, sharper predictions, and new scientific insights. Across all awardees, including Department of Energy national laboratories that claimed 87 awards, the U of A tied for 11th nationally in total numbers.
Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, senior vice president for research and partnerships at the university, pointed to deliberate institutional investments. "Having one of higher education's few dedicated chief AI officers has helped us build the partnerships, infrastructure and culture needed to integrate AI across disciplines-from quantum and cybersecurity to environmental and biological research," he said. "These awards and our innovative track record of AI expertise and AI-enabled innovation reflect that vision and reinforce our role among the nation's leading research universities."
The five funded projects
The winning U of A proposals span quantum science, Earth system modeling, computational biology, and AI security:
- Marwan Krunz, Regents Professor of electrical and computer engineering, will lead development of physics-informed AI tools that make scientific workflows more resilient against cyberattacks. Partners from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will collaborate on the effort.
- Scott Saleska, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Center for Biosphere 2, will apply AI to improve predictions of subsurface interactions-how water, minerals, plants, and microbes behave underground. The project tests models using Biosphere 2's Landscape Evolution Observatory and involves additional U of A colleagues and Berkeley Lab researchers.
- Pooja Siwach, assistant professor of physics, will create an AI framework that automatically selects the most efficient classical, quantum, or hybrid computing approach for complex nuclear physics problems, working with computer scientist Chicheng Zhang and collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
- Travis Wheeler, associate professor in the R. Ken Coit College of Pharmacy, will use AI to predict protein motion and function, dramatically reducing the time needed to model enzyme behavior for applications in bioenergy, agriculture, and environmental science. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a partner.
- Laura Condon, professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences, is partnering with Argonne National Laboratory's Eugene Yan on a lab-led project to build an AI foundation model that couples surface and groundwater predictions for water availability and flood hazards across the continental United States.
Why this matters for science and research professionals
David Ebert, who joined the U of A in 2025 as its chief AI officer, described the projects as evidence of a shift in the research landscape. "We're entering a new era in which AI is becoming an indispensable partner in scientific discovery," he said. "Whether identifying new quantum computing strategies, predicting the behavior of complex biological systems or improving environmental models, these projects show how AI can enable researchers to ask bigger questions, solve harder problems and reach answers faster."
For scientists and engineers working in government, academia, and industry labs, the Genesis Mission awards signal where federal funding for AI-driven science is heading-toward tools that speed up modeling, tighten security, and automate the choice of computational methods. The U of A's success also highlights how institutions that build centralized AI expertise can compete for large-scale, multi-institutional grants at the frontier of discovery.
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