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The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has received $20 million from the National Science Foundation to establish ATHENA, a materials-research facility that will run experiments with limited human involvement.

For Tennessee, the award plants a federally funded node of a 20-hub national network on the Knoxville campus, deepening the region’s bench in two areas the state has been building around: artificial intelligence and advanced materials.

“The NSF had this vision of building the network of the programmable cloud labs, with the key emphasis on the interconnectivity between those labs. So, interestingly, their original plan was to fund six. They ended up funding 20,” said the ATHENA project lead, Sergei Kalinin, the Weston Fulton Professor at UT’s Tickle College of Engineering.

The project co-leads are Mahshid Ahmadi, associate professor of materials science and engineering, and Hairong Qi, Gonzalez Family Professor of electrical engineering and computer science. It draws on 12 UT faculty plus collaborators at Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University.

Short for the Advanced Testbed for High-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science, ATHENA is designed to speed up how new materials are designed, made, measured, and refined — steps that today can take researchers hours or days per experiment. The lab is built to plan, conduct and adjust those experiments on its own, then flag the candidates with the most practical potential.

What does success look like?

“Success can be defined on many levels,” Kalanin said. “One of those could be accelerating the research by a factor of two or more. Another could be running our microscopes 100 times faster. Or, maybe we will be able to run experiments 10 to 30 times faster compared to the human baseline. All of these would be indicators of success.”

ATHENA is part of NSF’s Platform for Cloud Laboratories initiative, a national effort to link remotely accessible, AI-enabled labs across materials science and biotechnology and open advanced instruments to researchers elsewhere in the country.

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