Iowa State University is the lead institution in four research projects and university faculty are collaborators on four additional projects that are part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) sweeping Genesis Mission. The awards were announced July 22 in Washington D.C. One of the project's is led by statistics assistant professor Pulong Ma.
The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative to build the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform by uniting government, industry, academia and philanthropy. The chosen projects will accelerate breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery and national security through a new platform that combines artificial intelligence (AI), supercomputing, quantum systems and advanced scientific instruments.
Peter Dorhout, Iowa State’s Vice President for Research, said “As an institution, we’re honored and excited to support the Department of Energy in its historic Genesis Mission. The innovations our faculty are spearheading show how intelligent, data-rich tools can open new frontiers and accelerate discovery that delivers profound economic impact to our constituents and stakeholders throughout Iowa and around the nation.”
According to the Genesis Mission Phase I Request for Application (RFA): “The goal . . . 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.”
Project title: A Spatial Generative Bayesian Computation Framework for Inferring Turbulence-Microphysics Interactions
Lead Principal Investigator (PI): Pulong Ma, Statistics
Iowa State Co-PI: Hongyang Gao, Computer Science
Partner: Argonne National Laboratory
AI driven retrieval offers a path to infer cloud microphysical and dynamical states from Doppler radar data beyond the capabilities of conventional models. The project combines experts in weather science, computing, and statistics to build spatial AI tools that can estimate key cloud behaviors and measure uncertainty by comparing AI‑generated simulations with real observations. The research begins with warm clouds and later expands to mixed phase and deep convection using multimodal data across the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) network. The broader goal is to develop an easy-to-use and real-time AI retrieval framework to enable atmospheric and energy science discovery.
Learn more about other Iowa State-led research projects.
