Lehigh University receives two federal Genesis Mission awards

Lehigh University researchers received two funding awards from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative uniting national labs, industry, academia and philanthropy to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science and national security. 

The projects are aimed at improving flood- and water-level prediction and enable progress toward safe nuclear fusion energy.  

The awards were among 278 projects selected.  

Lehigh was one of 41 universities leading two or more projects.

“Lehigh’s faculty have long done outstanding research at the intersection of AI and energy and we are excited that two proposals from our faculty will be supported by this critical new program,” said Nathan Urban, Lehigh provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “This support reinforces the importance of our investments in our centers for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions and in Catastrophe Modeling and Resilience, and highlights the role that Lehigh is playing in advancing innovation needed to create the secure, stable and resilient energy infrastructure that is the foundation of American economic competitiveness.”

One project “RIVER-AI: Reservoir-Groundwater Interactions for River Flow Variability, Energy, and Resilience with AI, seeks to develop a hybrid AI-physics modeling platform that improves prediction of river flows critical to energy systems by accounting for the “memory” of reservoirs and groundwater.  

The university said current hydrologic models inadequately represent and predict how water storage, reservoir operations, groundwater and human management decisions interact. 

The “REACT: Reactor Exhaust And Core Twin — Multi-fidelity AI Predictions for Safe, Integrated, and High-Performance Control” project aims to accelerate the realization of reactor-scale fusion energy by developing an AI-enabled digital twin that integrates core plasma performance with edge plasma exhaust management in real time. 

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. 

“America has no shortage of bold ideas or talented scientists, and the response to the Genesis Mission proves that,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation’s scientific enterprise. The remarkable number of high-quality proposals we received demonstrates that America’s innovation pipeline is strong, and it points to even greater opportunities for future investment and continued expansion of the Genesis Mission portfolio.”