PNNL

The AI+ Expo is hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project and is designed to highlight U.S. leadership in AI and strengthen U.S. and allied competitiveness in critical technologies to attract those looking to support the future of AI and build relationships across government, academia, and industry. 

Located in the heart of our nation’s capital, this event features keynote speeches, panel discussions, and interactive exhibits focused on demonstrating U.S. leadership in the field of AI.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) will join other Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories on the expo floor (Booth #945) to showcase AI technology that can identify subtle changes in growing films that are imperceptible to humans as well as an agentic-AI-developed tool to expedite chemical catalysis discovery.

Advancing the Genesis Mission

Experts from across all 17 DOE national laboratories are uniting through the Genesis Mission with industry, academia, and other partners to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy, discovery science, and national security. Led by DOE, the Genesis Mission will integrate supercomputers, experimental facilities, AI systems, and unique datasets into a powerful scientific platform to double U.S. research impact within a decade. Through leading projects like the Center for AI @PNNL and innovations applied across multiple research areas, PNNL can provide foundational models, tools, and applications for the advances that DOE offers the nation and more.

Featured PNNL Presentations and Demos 

PRESENTATION: The Genesis Mission’s Transformational AI Models Consortium – ModCon 

Date: May 7, 2026

The Transformational AI Models Consortium (ModCon) is a foundational initiative of the Genesis Mission to mobilize the nation’s scientific and technological resources to develop and deploy groundbreaking AI models that revolutionize scientific discovery. This talk will describe ModCon’s core crosscutting capabilities: baseline AI research and development, best practices for scientific workflows, data brokers and standards, and more. Attendees will gain an understanding of how ModCon supports collaborative, large-scale AI development across the DOE national laboratories.

PNNL speaker: Court Corley, chief scientist for artificial intelligence

DEMO: ACCORD: AI Co-Scientist to Expedite Chemistry Catalysis Research

Date: May 7, 2026

ACCORD is a secure, multi-agent AI workbench that speeds catalysis research by integrating the end-to-end workflow—literature and database retrieval, structured knowledge extraction and knowledge-graph creation, hypothesis and mechanism generation, and orchestrated computational runs with full provenance—into one governed environment. In the demo, a planner–executor architecture breaks tasks into inspectable steps with human approval gates, while runtime security policies control tool access and permitted actions to safely produce reusable research artifacts and consistent data for AI-driven autonomous science.

PNNL presenter: Robert Rallo, acting director of the Program Development Office

DEMO: Generative AI for Science, Energy, and Security 

Date: May 8, 2026

PNNL's Generative AI for Science, Energy, and Security research program has completed over 50 projects spanning materials and chemical sciences, Earth and atmospheric science, grid modernization, predictive phenomics, nuclear security, cybersecurity, and autonomous experimentation. This talk shares what we’ve learned from putting AI scientists together with subject matter experts on small, targeted, mission-focused projects. We’ll explore the practical lessons, common patterns, and hard-won insights from answering the question every lab faces: “So you have a model…now what?”

PNNL presenter: Tom Grimes, senior data scientist 

Careers at PNNL

As a national laboratory that conducts an abundance of research using advanced mathematics, we are always searching for talented individuals looking to be a part of our mission.