PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas (Aug. 28, 2025) – As Prairie View A&M University and Texas Southern University prepare to face off in this weekend’s Labor Day Classic, the two rivals are also joining forces off the field. Together, they’re leading a $2.2 million research project that uses artificial intelligence to speed up the discovery of new materials — a breakthrough with the potential to transform manufacturing and defense technology.
The project, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Air Force Office of Scientific Research, establishes the Center for Scientific Machine Learning for Material Sciences. Texas Southern is leading the grant, with Prairie View A&M receiving $600,000 to guide a major part of the work. They are joined by Texas A&M University and the University of Michigan.
At TSU, the project is led by Dr. Yunjiao Wang, principal investigator, and Dr. Daniel Vrinceanu, co-principal investigator. At PVAMU, the effort is headed by Dr. Noushin Ghaffari, principal investigator, and Dr. Lin Li, co-principal investigator. Together, these scientists are building advanced machine learning tools to predict, optimize, and simulate new materials with greater speed and accuracy.
So what does this research mean? Materials science is the study of how everyday materials, such as metals, ceramics, and polymers, can be designed or improved for use in products like airplanes, cars, medical devices, and electronics. Machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, allows computers to recognize patterns in massive sets of data and make predictions. By combining the two, researchers can discover better, stronger, and lighter materials faster than ever before.
At the center of this work is the electron beam powder bed fusion (E-Beam) platform at Texas A&M University, a state-of-the-art 3D printing technology for metals managed in Dr. Mohsen Taheri’s lab. By pairing this equipment with data from sensors and advanced computer models, including deep neural networks, the team aims to predict how materials will behave and perform long before they’re ever produced.
Beyond advancing science, the project is designed to open doors for students. Both Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern will provide hands-on research experiences, summer workshops, and mentorship to prepare the next generation of engineers and data scientists. These opportunities are especially critical for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), where representation in high-tech research fields is growing but still limited.
So, while PVAMU and TSU will battle it out on the gridiron this weekend, they’re proving that when it comes to innovation and education, they’re playing on the same team.
A modified version of this story was originally posted at pvamu.edu/research.
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