ATHENA (Advanced Testbed for High-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science) is a four-year, $20 million project funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Programmable Cloud Labs program. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville leads the effort under principal investigator Sergei Kalinin, Weston Fulton Professor in the Tickle College of Engineering, with co-principal investigators Hairong Qi and Mahshid Ahmadi of UT, Christopher Wolverton of Northwestern University, and Kamal Choudhary of Johns Hopkins University.  ATHENA is one of 20 hubs in a national network of AI-powered cloud laboratories established by the NSF to accelerate scientific discovery.

Computational models can now predict promising materials far faster than laboratories can make and test them. ATHENA addresses that bottleneck with remotely accessible, AI-enabled self-driving laboratories that can plan, conduct, and refine experiments in material synthesis and characterization. Powering this ecosystem is NICS, which architects and operates the foundational computational infrastructure that drives ATHENA. By engineering the secure hardware and software architecture behind the platform, NICS orchestrates the complex AI workflows, high-throughput data pipelines, and seamless cloud connectivity required to give researchers nationwide scalable, real-time control over automated laboratory instruments.

For more on the project, see the UT news release, UT Secures $20M NSF Grant to Pioneer Breakthroughs in Automated Materials Discovery.

ATHENA is supported by NSF award 2607469.