GoKawiilDarío Gil is the science chief at the US Department of Energy.Credit: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty
At a time when the administration of US President Donald Trump is trying to slash federal spending on science, Darío Gil is in an enviable position. As under-secretary for science for the US Department of Energy (DoE), he presides over programmes that the administration prizes: those advancing artificial intelligence and quantum science.
Trump’s AI ‘Genesis Mission’: what are the risks and opportunities?
But he’s also got the unenviable task of convincing scientists that these fields deserve the massive investments they are receiving — at a time when researchers are worried about securing funding for basic research and losing jobs to AI.
Last week, his agency announced its goal of building the world’s first ‘fault tolerant’ quantum computer for solving scientific problems by 2028, in response to Trump’s executive order on quantum innovation. Also on Gil’s to-do list: boost researchers’ confidence in AI through the administration’s US$600-million Genesis mission, which launched last November.
As part of Genesis, the DoE has been tasked with developing an overarching AI platform, imbued with a variety of models, that can connect and query scientific instruments, supercomputers and data sets at the country’s 17 national laboratories. The goal is to use this architecture to tackle scientific challenges in collaboration with researchers at universities and private companies.
Gil acknowledges that enthusiasm for the initiative has not been uniform, but says this is to be expected: academics “are educated to be sceptical”.
Still, some are eager — or, they’ve gotten the memo that this is where they can find funding. The DoE’s first call for Genesis proposals in March garnered a record 5,000 applications, which is 2.5 times more than the agency has ever received for a funding call, Gil says. “It’s a lot of enthusiasm.” Next month, the agency will announce a limited pool of winners, to which it will collectively distribute $293 million in funding.
Addressing scepticism
Gil moved from Spain to the United States as a secondary-school exchange student. After earning a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, he took a position at computer giant IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he eventually climbed the ranks to research director and senior vice-president. He joined the DoE last September.
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