DOE awards 4 Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley scientists funding for AI research | Campus

Four Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers have received Early Career Research Program awards from the U.S. Department of Energy. Each scientist will receive $875,000 from the department to pursue their desired research over the next five years.

The awardees — Asmit Bhowmick, Bingqing Cheng, Marcus Noack and Dan Wang — will focus their research on applying artificial intelligence, which the federal administration has labeled “superintelligence,” in the fields of physics, biology and chemistry. Both Wang and Noack will focus on developing AI systems that are guided by physics, with Wang’s research focusing on AI’s possible use to control particle accelerators.

Cheng, an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, will use AI to try to find how electric fields affect chemistry.

Bill Johansen, the chief of staff to the deputy lab director for research at Berkeley Lab, said after a wave of research in machine learning in the 2010s, the lab is trying to find applications for that research in other domains.

“The great thing about a national lab is you have all the multiple disciplines working together to solve big problems,” Johansen said. “That’s definitely been a part of what we’ve been in front of and looking at and trying to lead.”

The awards were dispensed by the Office of Science of the DOE, which describes itself as the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences nationwide, supporting 32,000 researchers. Berkeley Lab has won many Early Career Research Program awards since the program was established in 2010, Johansen said.

Johansen also noted that Berkeley Lab recruits many mid-career researchers from industry, other national labs and academia.

“We’ve done a lot in the last 10 years focusing on our early-career researchers and investing in them and helping them foster not only their research, but also just being a (principal investigator) or a supervisor in a setting and teaching some of those skills that you don’t necessarily get as part of your academic training,” Johansen said. “Recently, we’ve actually started doing a similar program for our mid-career researchers as well.”

Johansen said the majority of the lab’s total funding comes from the DOE, primarily in the form of competitive awards such as the Early Career Research Program awards. Berkeley Lab, managed by the University of California, is a DOE national laboratory.