In November 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy announced the launch of its “Genesis Mission,” a national initiative that “unites DOE National Labs, industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.” The program aimed to quickly marshal research talent from across the country, requesting proposals to tackle 26 science and technology challenges.
Now, the Genesis Mission’s first awardees have been announced, and two John and Marcia Price College of Engineering faculty members are among them: Rohan Basu Roy and Morteza Fayazi.
Rohan Basu Roy
Assistant Professor
Kahlert School of Computing
Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute
Project Title: Dispatchable Data Centers: AI-Driven Workload Flexibility for Grid-Aware Load Shaping
One of the major challenges of increasing national compute capacity is the unprecedented load that AI places on the power grid. This load isn’t evenly distributed; spikes in demands shift in both time and space, making it difficult to estimate the energy costs for any one computational job.
Roy and his colleagues will address this challenge by capturing and analyzing data center workloads such that they can be dynamically priced, taking advantage of temporal flexibility in the system. Their project aims to develop a runtime control plane that operates as an AI workflow with three agents: a sensing agent that estimates per-job costs, a planning agent that selects constrained actions in response, and a scenario agent that models potential grid conditions. These agents will be coordinated by an orchestrator with memory that retrains all three based on the outcomes of the actions taken.
The project’s academic partners are the Rochester Institute of Technology and Argonne National Laboratory. Roy will also collaborate with industry partners PacifiCorp, Micron, NVIDIA, and Bay Compute.
“Rohan is truly a rising star in high-performance computing, and this Genesis award underscores the national impact of his research,” said Manish Parashar, chief AI officer for the U and executive director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, where Roy is a core faculty member. “He is tackling the urgent challenge of balancing AI’s immense energy demands with grid stability, positioning the U at the forefront of sustainable innovation.”
Morteza Fayazi
Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Project Title: Neuromorphic Terahertz Imaging via Analog Compute-in-Memory in AI-Driven Augmented Reality Hardware
Working with Principal Investigator Hossein Naghavi at the University of Washington, along with colleagues at Texas A&M, PrimisAI, and NVIDIA, Fayazi will contribute to a project on augmented reality (AR) — systems that overlay relevant digital information on a user’s perception of the world. Such systems could have lifesaving applications, such as letting firefighters see through smoke, but the substantial computational resources necessary to provide real-time AR displays has limited them in practice.
Fayazi’s project aims to reduce that computational burden by radically changing where and how it’s performed. Starting with terahertz imaging sensors capable of seeing through non-conductive materials, Fayazi and his colleagues will develop a method of computing relevant features — such as the outlines of an object obscured by smoke — entirely on the sensor’s chip.
By avoiding power bottlenecks and the need to shuttle information back and forth from a CPU, the sensors could be integrated into a lightweight, wearable device.
“Breakthrough engineering requires the courage to pursue ideas that challenge conventional thinking,” said Hanseup Kim, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. “Morteza’s research embodies that spirit by advancing fundamentally new approaches with the potential to transform the field. The Genesis Mission is an exceptional investment in visionary research, and we are proud to support faculty whose work pushes the boundaries of engineering and drives future technological innovation.”