Aditya Grover, an assistant professor of Computer Science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been given the prestigious NSF CAREER award, the National Science Foundation’s highest honor for early-career faculty. While the award involves both an application and recognition process, it is highly competitive, with faculty members submitting detailed proposals for review. This five-year grant, titled Generative Machine Learning for Scientific Modeling and Discovery, will support Grover’s research on developing scientific foundation models. The project aims to create generative AI frameworks that facilitate scientific reasoning by efficiently analyzing large-scale scientific data to detect patterns, simulate natural phenomena, and propose experiments. Grover’s vision is to develop an AI ecosystem that learns with cost-effective, multi-scale, and multi-modal supervision, achieving strong generalization across diverse scientific fields, similar to current foundation models in language and vision.
At UCLA, Grover leads the Machine Intelligence Group in the Computer Science Department and is an affiliate faculty member at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. His group’s work in generative AI has garnered extensive recognition, including the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, the AI2050 Fellowship from Schmidt Sciences, and the Kavli Fellowship from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, among other accolades.