Faculty and students in The Catholic University of America’s College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing have recently received a number of grants and awards to advance their studies of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on discovery and innovation in other fields.
Over the summer, Tanja Horn, professor of physics, received a $750,000 National Science Foundation grant to support her research in experimental nuclear physics, and integrating AI to accelerate scientific discovery.
Professor Horn also teamed up with Dominick Rizk, assistant professor of computer science, to conduct research that leverages AI, advanced computing, and foundation models to integrate experimental and theoretical data across nuclear physics, particle physics, and astrophysics. The U.S. Department of Energy funded their project for $300,000 under its Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI initiative.
Colleague Minhee Jun, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, presented her AI-related research at two summer conferences. At the 2026 NIST–University Research Summit — held June 30-July 1 in Gaithersburg, MD — she detailed a vision for overcoming major bottlenecks in AI training and deployment. At the 3rd International Conference on AI Sensors and Transducers, held August 6 in Jeju, South Korea, she presented on next generation, AI-enabled sensing in physical AI.
Research assistant Vijay Kumar Korra and graduate student Aziz Ahmed Syed won awards for their research at the 2026 Machine Learning in Medical Intelligence conference, held July 17–20 in Tokyo, Japan. The paper “Toward Trustworthy Clinical AI: A Lesion-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Skin Cancer Screening,” led by Korra, won the Best Paper Award overall for the conference, while “TRUST-X: Triage with Uncertainty and Structured Transparency for Chest X-Ray Imaging,” led by Syed, received the Best Oral Presentation Award in the Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems Applications track and the Best Student Paper Award overall.
