The U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) will lead a critical fusion energy research project and partner on seven other initiatives as a part of the Genesis Mission: the national initiative to harness artificial intelligence (AI) for scientific discovery. Announced July 22, 2026, these awards will support the Lab's mission to harness on Earth the fusion energy that drives the sun and stars, while leading discoveries in plasma science and technology.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world's most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
The goal of the Phase I Request for Application awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation or generate new scientific insights.
Under the direction of Principal Research Physicist Syun'ichi Shiraiwa, the PPPL-led project will use AI to improve electron cyclotron heating (ECH): a crucial method for heating the plasma in fusion systems that use magnetic fields to hold the plasma. The research team will develop an AI system to autonomously operate the high-power gyrotrons used for ECH. The researchers will also build a digital twin, or virtual replica, to accelerate simulations of the physics inside a gyrotron and high-frequency gyrotron development needed by the fusion industry. Researchers from Rice University, the Naval Research Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Sophelio will collaborate on this project.
In addition, two Genesis Mission projects will be led by researchers with joint appointments at PPPL and Princeton University:
- Toward a Facility for Laboratory Reconnection Experiments (FLARE) Digital Twin: Accelerating Experimental Research Using Neural Networks - Hantao Ji, a distinguished research fellow at PPPL, principal investigator on FLARE and professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University
- Foundation Model Platform for Fusion Energy: A Multi-modal Multidevice Learning - Egemen Kolemen, a staff research physicist at PPPL and Princeton University professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
PPPL was also selected as a partner on five other Genesis Mission projects. The following researchers will lead the Lab's work on each:
- Core Accelerated Trajectories With Augmented Learning by Sim-to-experiment Transfer - Nathaniel Ferraro, deputy head of theory
- Automatic Performance Portability for Distributed Scientific Workflows on the Genesis Mission Platform - Shantenu Jha, head of computational sciences
- AI-based Adaptive Low-temperature Plasma for Healthcare, Agriculture and Advanced Manufacturing - Yevgeny Raitses, managing principal research physicist
- Data-driven Discovery of Multicomponent Plasma Fluid Dynamics - Ammar Hakim, principal research physicist
- AI-driven Rapid Discovery of Plasma Deposition for Novel Materials for Next-generation Semiconductor Devices - Igor Kaganovich, principal research physicist
"The national labs and industry have a shared set of interests and priorities and very complementary capabilities, with laboratories delivering knowledge and industry delivering products. That really opens the aperture toward driving fusion and plasma science forward together," said Laura Berzak Hopkins, PPPL's deputy director for research and chief research officer.
