Project
ATHENA: AI-Driven Automated Materials Discovery
A $20M NSF-funded testbed making UT a hub in the national network of AI-powered cloud laboratories for accelerated materials discovery — with Dr. Qi as one of three faculty leaders.
ATHENA — the Advanced Testbed for High-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science — is one of twenty research hubs in the National Science Foundation’s “Programmable Cloud Laboratories” test-bed program, a national network of remotely accessible, AI-enabled automated laboratories announced in July 2026.
The University of Tennessee-led project received $20 million over four years to dramatically accelerate the design, synthesis, characterization, and autonomous optimization of advanced materials. It is led by Sergei Kalinin (Weston Fulton Professor) together with Mahshid Ahmadi (Materials Science & Engineering) and Hairong Qi, who brings AICIP’s machine learning and computer vision expertise to the AI systems that will direct experiments. Roughly a dozen UT faculty participate, with key collaborators at Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University.
For AICIP, ATHENA is the lab’s largest venture into AI for scientific discovery: closing the loop between machine learning models and physical instruments, so that experiments are proposed, executed, and interpreted with progressively less human bottleneck.
ATHENA is a university-wide, multi-institution initiative in which AICIP participates; the award belongs to the full UT-led team.