S&T Foundations Basic Research (Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering)

S&T Foundations is proud to highlight an achievement from our Laboratory University Collaborative (LUCI) community. Dr. Manoj Kolel-Veetil (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, OUSD(R&E) LUCI Fellow) and Prof. Surya Kalidindi (Georgia Institute of Technology, OUSD(R&E) Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow) just found a way to predict which "forever chemicals" can actually be broken down, and which ones can't, in milliseconds instead of hours. PFAS were engineered in the 1940s to survive heat, acid, and time itself. Today they contaminate soil, drinking water, and human blood across thousands of distinct chemical variants, and until now, figuring out which ones were vulnerable to treatment meant running expensive quantum chemistry simulations one molecule at a time. Published in Advanced Science, Drs. Kolel-Veetil and Kalidindi's machine learning framework changes that math entirely. It predicts which specific carbon-fluorine bonds are weak enough to break down under treatment and which molecules will resist it altogether, all without a single lab test. A calculation that once took two hours now takes milliseconds, turning a nearly impossible screening problem into a manageable one. It's also a clean example of what LUCI is built to do: pair a DoW laboratory fellow working close to mission need with a VBFF/MURI-funded academic pushing the fundamental science, and let the two accelerate each other. Read article here: https://lnkd.in/ePnDm8gz Congratulations to the full team behind this work: 🔹 Dr. Manoj Kolel-Veetil, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (OUSD(R&E) LUCI Fellow) 🔹 Prof. Surya Kalidindi, Georgia Institute of Technology (OUSD(R&E) Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow) 🔹 Pranoy Ray, lead author, Georgia Institute of Technology 🔹 Andrew Castillo, Multiscale Technologies Inc. #LUCI #VBFF #BasicResearch #PFAS #ForeverChemicals #MachineLearning #NavalResearchLaboratory

*Funding Opportunity + Webinar*: The Department of War needs a wide range of institutions contributing to defense R&D. That’s the entire driving force behind DEPSCOR (the Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research), it specifically helps universities in historically under-funded states compete for DoW grants and build up their foundational research infrastructure. The newest DEPSCOR solicitation is officially live! If you are thinking about applying, the S&T Foundations team is hosting a walkthrough of the opportunity. *Key Timeline & Dates*: - RunGrants Website Open for White Paper Submission: Monday, August 10, 2026 - DEPSCOR Webinar: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 (2:00 PM - 4:00 PM ET) - RunGrants Registration & Q&A Cut-Off: Wednesday, October 7, 2026 - White Paper Submission Deadline: Monday, October 12, 2026 - Notification of White Paper Selection: Friday, January 8, 2027 - Full Proposal Submission (by invitation only): Monday, April 5, 2027 - Notification of Selection for Award: Friday, July 23, 2027 *Resources & Next Steps*: The Grant Details: Review the live posting here to see if your institution is a fit: https://lnkd.in/eprsH-fG The Info Session: Our webinar on August 25th will provide a full walkthrough. Reserve your spot on Zoom here:  https://lnkd.in/erkgAm8C Hope to see you on the call! #DEPSCOR #DoDResearch #STFoundations #ResearchFunding #GrantOpportunity #BasicResearch

Just wrapped up a great site visit to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, led by Dr., Research Policy Director Dr. Jason O. Day for S&T Foundations Basic Research, alongside Dr. Lola Fatunmbi, PhD of Strategic Analysis Incorporated. Over three days (July 14-16), the team reviewed technical progress across 13 active Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) projects spanning quantum sensing, polariton chemistry, programmable nanomaterials, ferroelectric nitrides, high-intensity laser-matter interactions, hypersonic reactive flows, precision radiometry, and cognitive fatigue modeling. It’s hard to overstate how much ground that covers, and it was a privilege to sit with the researchers pushing the edges of each field. The visit also included tours of some incredible facilities: the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility the Zettawatt-Equivalent Ultrashort pulse laser system, the Ford Robotics Building, the Marine Hydrodynamics Lab, and the Mcity autonomous systems testbed. Seeing this kind of research infrastructure up close is a reminder of just how much fundamental science is a pacemaker for future national security capabilities. We also had the chance to meet with university leadership and graduate students to discuss overlapping research opportunities and where our priorities might align going forward. Conversations like these matter just as much as the research updates and lab tours. A huge thank you to Christine Muchanic, Neil Canfield, and Zachary Weber for being such incredible hosts, organizing the visit, and getting us around the beautiful campus. It made all the difference. We’re grateful for the chance to support this kind of basic research oversight, and we’re looking forward to continued collaboration with Michigan, including exciting potential partnerships with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the NAVSEA Professors Program. #BasicResearch #Quantum #MaterialsScience

We're thrilled to celebrate Laboratory University Collaboration Initiative (LUCI) Fellow, Dr. Anesia Auguste, PhD and her team at the Air Force Research Laboratory, in collaboration with Texas A&M University and supported by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering LUCI Program, on a remarkable breakthrough. They've developed a way to program exactly how a "smart" material bends, stiffens, and morphs into complex 3D shapes, all using a single flash of patterned light. For years, building these shape-shifting liquid crystal elastomers meant slow, piece-by-piece fabrication. This new method collapses that into one programmable step, opening up exciting new possibilities for stretchable electronics, adaptive optics, and conformable hardware that can bend around a wing or fold itself into shape. This achievement reflects a tremendous collaborative effort, led by co-first authors Jared Gibson and Asaf Dana. Congratulations to Dr. Anesia Auguste, Jared Gibson, Asaf Dana, Taylor Ware (corresponding author), Sahana Dhananjayan, Manivannan Sivaperuman Kalairaj, Yoo Jin Lee, Kyle Carothers, and Hilmar Koerner on this incredible advance. This is exactly the kind of bold, foundational research that makes us proud to support the next generation of scientific discovery! 👏 🔗 Read the work in Macromolecules: https://lnkd.in/eUUkUATz #BasicResearch #MaterialsScience #LUCI #DefenseInnovation #AFRL

What if a more capable AI teammate actually made your team worse? That's the counterintuitive finding from new research by Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow (VBFF) Prof. Paul Sajda, Yinuo Qin, Richard Lee (Columbia University), published in Nature Publishing Journal Artificial Intelligence and supported by the DoW S&T Foundations VBFF Program. In an immersive simulation inspired by the Apollo 13 mission, Prof. Sajda's and his team of collaborators ran a clever experiment: they secretly disguised a human expert as an AI teammate. The "AI" performed flawlessly, identically to a skilled human. Yet the human operators who believed they were working alongside AI performed measurably worse. They communicated less, worked harder for poorer results, and showed real physiological signs of stress, including elevated pupil dilation, higher blink rates, and altered brain-to-brain synchrony. And the gap only widened as the task got harder. The takeaway is striking: the problem wasn't the machine's capability. It was the human's perception of it. Belief alone was enough to disrupt coordination, even when the AI did everything right. As the Department advances the integration of autonomous systems across missions, from manned-unmanned teaming to distributed command and control, this work offers a valuable insight: getting the most out of AI depends not only on the capability we build into the machine, but on how we design the human-machine partnership around it. Prof. Sajda's team points to a promising path forward through three design principles: introducing AI involvement in ways that build operator trust, incorporating features that monitor and support operator readiness, and designing AI that strengthens human-to-human teamwork rather than replacing it. This is exactly the kind of bold, foundational research the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship was built to support: blue-sky science today that becomes warfighter advantage tomorrow. Read the study: https://lnkd.in/e9S2DdkC #BasicResearch #VBFF #ArtificialIntelligence #HumanMachineTeaming #DefenseInnovation #ScienceAndTechnology

Imagine burying a clock in the darkest corner of the Moon and having it become the most accurate timekeeping device in the solar system. That's essentially what Prof. Jun Ye's and his collaborators , Zoey Hu, Ben Lewis, Wei Zhang, Fritz Riehle, Uwe Sterr, Yiqi Ni, and Julian Struck are proposing. Prof Ye is a physicist at JILA and a Vannevar Bush Fellow, supported by the United States Department of War. Their new PNAS paper (link here: https://lnkd.in/e3NiFqHE) makes a counterintuitive case: the Moon's permanently shadowed polar craters, places so cold and still that they never see sunlight, are actually the ideal environment for an ultrastable laser. No vibration. No atmosphere. Temperatures near absolute zero. The very things that make these craters inhospitable to humans make them perfect for precision physics. The practical payoff is significant. There is currently no GPS for the Moon, no shared time standard, and no positioning system for the missions heading to the south pole. Ye's concept addresses all of that, using a single silicon cavity in a crater as the anchor for lunar navigation, communications, and timekeeping. A test version could fly in two years. A lunar deployment via Artemis within five. The U.S. has a narrow window to own this infrastructure before anyone else does. Investments in basic research are what put us in a position to take it. Basic research funded by the Department of War is what makes moments like this possible. This research was highlighted on the The Brighter Side of News here: https://lnkd.in/eNcgRBgb #QuantumScience #PrecisionTiming #LunarExploration #BasicResearch

What if AI agents could do science the way the best research teams do, proposing bold ideas, challenging each other, and iterating toward breakthroughs no single mind would reach alone? United States Department of War, Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow, Prof. George Karniadakis and collaborator Qile Jiang (Brown University) just showed that's not a thought experiment anymore. Their AgenticSciML framework, published last month in Nature Portfolio's Artificial Intelligence, deploys over 10 specialized AI agents that collaborate through structured debate and evolutionary search to design Scientific Machine Learning solutions from scratch. What the team found was remarkable: across a suite of challenging physics and engineering problems, the system outperformed both single-agent AI and human-designed baselines by up to four orders of magnitude in error reduction. Even more striking, the agents invented solution strategies that weren't in their knowledge base to begin with. That's not optimization. That's emergent discovery. For those of us working at the intersection of science and national security, this matters. The same principles that helped these agents crack fluid mechanics and PDE problems could accelerate discovery across materials design, threat detection, quantum systems, and beyond. Basic research is always laying the groundwork for what's next. Congratulations to Prof. Karniadakis and Qile Jiang on this exciting work. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eAs9DbK5 #VannevarBush #BasicResearch #AIforScience #DefenseResearch #DepartmentofWar

Congratulations to Dr. Qimiao Si, Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow and Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, on being awarded a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship for the 2026-27 academic year! Dr. Si is among just 50 Radcliffe fellows selected from approximately 1,700 applicants, a testament to both his record of achievement and the exceptional promise of his research. During his fellowship year, he will advance his work on quantum entanglement in highly collective quantum materials, pushing the boundaries of how we understand emergent quantum phenomena in complex systems. As director of the Extreme Quantum Materials Alliance, Dr. Si's research sits at the frontier of quantum science, exploring how vast numbers of electrons collectively organize to produce entirely new forms of matter. His group's recent work has pioneered the use of measurable quantum entanglement as a new lens for understanding strange metals and other highly collective quantum materials. We are especially proud to congratulate Qimiao on this well-deserved recognition. Basic research like his is exactly what S&T Foundations exists to support: curiosity-driven, high-risk, high-reward science that opens doors we don't yet know exist. We look forward to the discoveries ahead. See link to article here: https://lnkd.in/ePpgU9eZ #BasicResearch #QuantumScience #QuantumEntanglement #FederalResearch #OUSDRandE #STFoundations #HarvardRadcliffe #RiceUniversity

Looking forward to the day & showing off a snippet of the impact our enterprise is having!

Proud to celebrate two of S&T Foundations' own being honored among Air Force Research Laboratory's best. 🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Maxwell Gregoire (LUCI 2024) and Dr. Luke A. Baldwin (LUCI 2021, 2026) on receiving the 2025 Air Force Research Laboratory Science and Engineering Early Career Award — recognized at a ceremony held March 31 at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. The AFRL Early Career Award recognizes government scientists and engineers whose accomplishments have aided AFRL's core mission areas — individuals with no more than 15 years since their bachelor's degree who are already making outsized contributions to the lab's research portfolio. Maxwell and Luke are current fellows of the Laboratory University Collaboration Initiative (LUCI) program, which builds the kind of deep, sustained university-government research partnerships that move the needle on national security S&T. Their recognition as AFRL ECAs is a direct reflection of what that ongoing investment yields. As AFRL Commander Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei remarked at the ceremony: "For Early Career Award winners, this is a bellwether of a bright and amazing future." We couldn't agree more. The future is in excellent hands. 🔗 Full announcement: https://lnkd.in/eeMDUAeB #LUCI #AFRL #BasicResearch #STFoundations #NationalSecurity #EarlyCareer #ScienceAndTechnology #DoD