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UT wins $20M NSF award for ATHENA — with Dr. Qi among its three faculty leaders
The NSF selected UT as one of twenty national hubs in its Programmable Cloud Laboratories network. ATHENA will apply AI to automated materials discovery, with AICIP providing the machine learning core.
The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Tennessee, Knoxville $20 million over four years to build ATHENA — the Advanced Testbed for High-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science — as part of the NSF’s new national network of AI-powered cloud laboratories.
ATHENA is led by Sergei Kalinin (Weston Fulton Professor) together with Mahshid Ahmadi (Materials Science & Engineering) and AICIP director Hairong Qi, whose team brings the machine learning and computer vision methods that will let automated microscopes and synthesis equipment propose, run, and interpret experiments with minimal human bottleneck. Roughly a dozen UT faculty participate, with collaborators at Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University.
For AICIP, the award opens the lab’s largest venture yet into AI for scientific discovery. See the ATHENA project page for details.