Dean's Message
Accelerating Discovery and Design of Quantum Materials with AI
August 2026
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I have great news! UC San Diego engineers and physical scientists have been awarded $18M from the US National Science Foundation to accelerate the discovery and design of quantum materials using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques. This NSF funding is from the prestigious Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) program.
What made us ready for this new MRSEC funding? Our materials faculty are truly world class, and they are already using custom machine-learning models — based on first principles — to do things like prioritize candidate materials to make in the lab.
Focusing some of our incredible materials strengths on quantum materials is timely, given that tomorrow’s quantum materials will advance low-power computing, data encryption, secure communications, medical diagnostics, sensors, stealth materials and high-performance electronics.
This is our second consecutive round of MRSEC funding at UC San Diego. With our first MRSEC, we built up our capacity to work across disciplines to discover and design relevant new materials. Now, we are augmenting all of this disciplinary strength with machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop both quantum metamaterials and two-dimensional superlattice materials. We are doing this as a powerful team drawn from the Jacobs School of Engineering and the School of Physical Sciences.
Congratulations and thank you to the faculty leadership team across engineering and physical sciences, and to everyone who made the heavy lift required to secure this wildly competitive materials funding. Our engineers and physical scientists put in maximal effort. And their hard work, combined with world-class excellence, has paid off.
Here at the Jacobs School, we are bringing the incredible power of disciplinary expertise combined with AI/ML to many critical R&D areas, not just to quantum materials. A 2026 report from the non-partisan think tank the Institute for Progress articulates some of the positive impacts that world-class engineering schools like ours can make by combining our disciplinary strengths with strategic efforts to accelerate the development and use of AI/ML models trained on experimental data and physics-based simulations.
Within the UC San Diego Fusion Engineering Institute, for example, we are doing groundbreaking work in materials, plasma physics, lasers, systems engineering, high-performance computing and more — thanks to the combined strengths of domain expertise and AI/ML.
Healthcare engineering is another area where we are bringing together domain experts across engineering, medicine and AI. Our goal is real-world impacts that improve lives.
We are bringing education best practices together with custom AI systems through the Smart Learning Hub and its AI Tutors. At the same time, our artificial intelligence major serves as a national model.
This is just scratching the surface. Over the decades, we have developed incredible disciplinary strengths across the entire Jacobs School — and our #9 national ranking from US News & World Report reflects these myriad strengths.
I am excited to engage in new collaborations connecting campus, industry and government efforts around new quantum materials and many other domains. By looking beyond business as usual, we have incredible opportunities to advance our global competitiveness while improving lives. If you are interested in getting engaged, please reach out.
The full August 2026 newsletter from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is here.
As always, I can be reached at DeanPisano@ucsd.edu.
Sincerely,
Al
Albert ("Al") P. Pisano
Dean, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Special Adviser to the Chancellor for Campus Strategic Initiatives