The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has received $20 million from the National Science Foundation to establish ATHENA (Advanced Testbed for High-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science), one of 20 research hubs in the US that will form a national network of AI-powered laboratories to accelerate scientific discovery.
Led by Sergei Kalinin, Weston Fulton Professor in UT’s Tickle College of Engineering; Mahshid Ahmadi, associate professor of materials science and engineering; and Hairong Qi, Gonzalez Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, ATHENA brings together a multidisciplinary team of 12 faculty members from UT along with key collaborators at Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University. The ATHENA initiative aims to revolutionize materials discovery by dramatically accelerating the design, synthesis, characterization, and autonomous optimization of advanced materials, enabling the rapid identification of materials with the greatest potential for real-world applications.
While artificial intelligence has dramatically improved scientists’ ability to predict promising new materials, testing those predictions takes time and remains labor intensive.
“Predictions alone don’t create new technologies,” Kalinin said. “At some point, those materials have to be synthesized, measured, and understood in the real world. ATHENA is about dramatically accelerating that process.”
ATHENA is part of NSF’s Platform for Cloud Laboratories initiative, a nationwide effort to transform scientific research by connecting remotely accessible AI-enabled laboratories that can autonomously plan, conduct, and refine experiments. The initiative is designed to accelerate discoveries in materials science and biotechnology while expanding researchers’ access to advanced scientific instrumentation across the country.