LSU Wins Two Highly Competitive Genesis Mission Awards
July 22, 2026
Projects with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory will use artificial intelligence to advance nuclear science and supercharge the particle accelerators that power American discovery, including LSU’s Louisiana Light Source.
Two LSU-led research teams have been selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative that harnesses artificial intelligence and the department’s 17 national laboratories to double the productivity of American science within a decade. The scale of the Genesis Mission has been described as on par with the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program.
“America has no shortage of bold ideas or talented scientists, and the response to the Genesis Mission proves that,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said. “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.”
LSU’s winning projects, led by Department of Physics & Astronomy faculty Jeffery Blackmon and Phillip Sprunger, pair researchers and research core facilities at LSU with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory to solve two different challenges in modern physics: gaining insights into the physics of the atomic nucleus from the torrents of data from modern detector arrays, and keeping the nation’s most advanced light sources running at top performance.
“These projects capture exactly what LSU aspires to be as we drive toward the ranks of the nation’s Top 50 research universities—a place where our faculty work shoulder to shoulder with the national laboratories on the defining scientific challenges of our time. From our own synchrotron in Baton Rouge to the instruments developed by Oak Ridge and Brookhaven, LSU is bringing artificial intelligence to the front lines of discovery.”
LSU Chancellor Jim Dalton
The Genesis Mission, launched in November 2025, calls on the national laboratories, universities, and industry to build an integrated AI platform connecting the world’s most powerful supercomputers and scientific instruments. LSU’s two projects answer that call from both ends of the scientific pipeline—the instruments that produce data and the analysis that turns data into discovery.
Teaching AI to Read the Signatures of the Atomic Nucleus
When nuclei decay or collide, they emit neutrons and gamma rays that carry the fingerprints of nuclear physics—information essential to nuclear energy, the origin of heavy elements in the cosmos, cancer treatment, and national security. Arrays of scintillator detectors capture these particles efficiently, but extracting the underlying physics from their signals is a mathematically thorny problem that can take scientists months or years to untangle, delaying discoveries long after experiments end.
Blackmon’s team brings together faculty from LSU (Kristina Launey, Alexis Mercenne, Marta Missiaggia, and Michela Negro), faculty from University of Kentucky (Erin Peters), and researchers and staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Air Force Institute of Technology to attack this bottleneck with a two-stage AI system. First, deep neural networks trained on detector physics will reconstruct neutron and gamma-ray energies from raw signals. Then, an AI agent—a specialized large language model steeped in nuclear databases and peer-reviewed literature—will propose refinements to the physics models, with expert scientists grading each suggestion. Every proposal, rating, and decision will be logged, turning human scientific judgment itself into a measurable, improvable part of the analysis. The team combines diverse expertise, including in nuclear theory and machine learning, with gamma-ray observations from medical imaging, nuclear laboratories on Earth, and orbiting observatories.
“We are excited about this project’s potential impact on our understanding of atomic nuclei and applications including astrophysics, nuclear energy, and nuclear security,” said Blackmon, an experimental nuclear physicist and Russell B. Long Professor of Physics at LSU. “As humans, it can be hard for us to think in more than a few dimensions at a time. We often see our graduate students struggle for months, even years, to analyze data sets that might have been captured in a few hours. Students can get bogged down because of ambiguities in the data. We hope AI can help us use the correlations between the many measured parameters to greatly speed the pipeline of data analysis and provide new insights into the properties of nuclei.”
Oak Ridge brings two of the world’s premier nuclear instruments to the project: the ORNL Deuterated Scintillator Array, or ODeSA, used to measure neutron energies from nuclear reactions, and the Modular Total Absorption Spectrometer, or MTAS, which captures nearly all the gamma-ray energy released in radioactive decay of atomic nuclei. Oak Ridge scientists will supply more than a decade of measured data, detector response models, and benchmarked simulations, while collaborators at the University of Kentucky Accelerator Laboratory will validate the AI’s results against independent measurements.
“The Genesis Mission calls on institutions to rethink how scientific discovery is done, and this partnership reflects that ambition. Working with LSU, we have an opportunity to help define a new model for discovery—one that is faster, more connected, and more powerful in its impact on science and society.”
Marcel Demarteau, Director of the ORNL Physics Division
“This collaboration highlights the power of pairing ORNL’s unique nuclear science facilities and data resources with LSU’s innovative AI-driven approach,” added Charlie Rasco, an ORNL Physics Division staff member and former LSU researcher.
Smarter Light Sources: AI and Digital Twins for the Nation’s Synchrotrons
Sprunger’s project centers on one of LSU’s signature research core facilities: Louisiana Light Source. Like other synchrotrons, it accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to generate intense beams of X-rays and other radiation that scientists use to understand and develop materials, chemistry, biology, and energy technologies. Keeping these machines stable and reliable means managing millions of interacting variables in real time—a challenge tailor-made for AI.
The team, which includes Launey and LSU synchrotron operators, unites Louisiana Light Source with Brookhaven National Laboratory, home of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, or NSLS-II, one of the world’s brightest light sources, and with RadiaSoft, a scientific software company that builds control-room interfaces for Department of Energy labs. Together they will develop AI systems that predict equipment failures weeks before they happen, investigate accelerator anomalies and explain them to operators, stabilize electron beams as powerful magnets ramp up and down, and optimize how particles are injected.
“This award puts LSU and our partners at the cutting edge of accelerator development,” said Sprunger, professor of physics and interim director of Louisiana Light Source. “While we’re invoking AI for Louisiana Light Source, a machine built 30 years ago, Brookhaven is invoking AI for optimization of their synchrotron and future upgrades. Still, we’re dealing with similar challenges, similar optimizations, and this project will allow us to work proactively instead of reactively and solve problems with digital twins before new capabilities are even on the ground.”
Brookhaven is planning a major upgrade of NSLS-II, and the LSU-led team will similarly deliver AI tools for designing its next-generation magnetic lattice—an optimization problem with more than a hundred coupled variables—including a physics-informed neural network that tracks particles through complex magnetic fields thousands of times faster than conventional simulations. These models will feed into another core capability at LSU—the development of digital twins. In this case, living virtual replicas of accelerators that let scientists rehearse upgrades, test commissioning strategies, and improve performance entirely in simulation before touching the real machine.
“Rapidly developing AI tools offer revolutionary opportunities to advance accelerator facility operations, such as those at NSLS-II or Louisiana Light Source, and for new insights into accelerator physics. This collaboration between LSU, NSLS-II, and RadiaSoft will pave the way for university, national laboratory, and industrial teams to unite on future large-scale projects in accelerator science and engineering.”
Timur Shaftan, NSLS-II Accelerator Division Director
Advancing the Genesis Mission
Both LSU-led projects advance the Genesis Mission’s core goals: using AI to accelerate scientific discovery, improve the efficiency and reliability of U.S. Department of Energy user facilities, and strengthen national security. The Blackmon team will speed the flow of new nuclear data into reactor design and nuclear stockpile stewardship, while the Sprunger team will make synchrotron light sources more productive.
These projects strengthen LSU’s partnerships across the national laboratory system and demonstrate the flagship university’s capacity to serve as a proving ground for emerging technologies aligned with national energy priorities.
About the Genesis Mission
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.