UT wins $20 million NSF grant for ATHENA materials lab

The University of Tennessee has received $20 million from the National Science Foundation to establish ATHENA, a research hub focused on automated materials discovery. ATHENA, short for Advanced Testbed for High-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science, is one of 20 U.S. hubs that will form a national network of AI-powered laboratories designed to accelerate scientific research.

The project is led by Sergei Kalinin, Gerd Duscher, Mahshid Ahmadi and Hairong Qi, with a multidisciplinary team of 12 UT faculty members and collaborators at Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University. The initiative aims to speed the design, synthesis, characterization and autonomous optimization of advanced materials, moving promising AI predictions into real-world testing more quickly.

ATHENA is part of NSF’s Platform for Cloud Laboratories initiative, which will connect remotely accessible AI-enabled labs that can plan, conduct and refine experiments. The UT-led team expects the platform to increase the speed of some materials characterization experiments by as much as 10-to-30 times, while creating open software standards, cloud-accessible workflows and tools for remote use of advanced scientific instruments.