Caltech Joins the Genesis Mission

Caltech News reports that the university has received federal funding as part of the Genesis Mission, a national initiative designed to use artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. Two Caltech-led projects have been selected to receive support. The first, directed by chemistry professor Theo Agapie, will develop a self-driving electrochemical laboratory that uses AI to explore new approaches to chemical manufacturing. The system is expected to efficiently navigate more than ten billion possible combinations of gases, electrolytes, and operating conditions. The second project, led by environmental microbiologist Victoria Orphan, will use AI to build models that better understand how microorganisms interact with each other in their natural environments—interactions that traditional laboratory methods cannot easily capture. Both projects represent a broader effort at Caltech to use artificial intelligence and machine learning with advanced scientific instruments to explore areas of science previously considered too labor-intensive or computationally expensive to tackle.

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