Inside NSF AIRFoundry, Senator McCormick Gets a Look at the Future of RNA Discovery

Standing inside the National Science Foundation (NSF) Artificial Intelligence-driven RNA BioFoundry (AIRFoundry) at One uCity Square, U.S. Senator Dave McCormick watched as Andrew Hanna, a graduate student in Bioengineering (BE), demonstrated one way Penn Engineering is accelerating RNA research.

“Each droplet is a different candidate for drug delivery,” said Hanna, pointing to a rectangular plastic plate dotted with tiny wells. “Conventionally, creating a single one of these would take a scientist 20 to 30 minutes.”

A robot that Hanna developed whirred, carrying the plate back and forth as it collected formulations mixed by tubes pushing fluid through a tiny chip, at speeds an order of magnitude faster than researchers could achieve by hand.

“So you’re creating a huge data set,” said McCormick. “Where does the data go next?”

Senator McCormick, second from left, asks Andrew Hanna, at left, a question about the latter’s new robotic system for rapidly formulating large numbers of lipid nanoparticles, at right. (Credit: Sylvia Zhang)

From Equipment to Impact

The exchange set the tone for McCormick’s first visit to the NSF AIRFoundry on Friday, May 15, where he met with Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the facility’s director; George J. Pappas, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation in Electrical and Systems Engineering and Penn Engineering’s Associate Dean for Research; and David F. Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor in Bioengineering and Penn’s Vice Provost for Research.

For more than an hour, Pennsylvania’s junior U.S. senator toured the facility’s labs, asking faculty, students and researchers detailed questions about the science in front of him and the conditions needed for that science to have an impact.

Who would use the NSF AIRFoundry’s tools? How are students being trained? How might the facility accelerate discovery in medicine, agriculture and biotechnology? And what federal support could help the United States remain competitive in AI-enabled research?

For McCormick, the visit offered a firsthand look at how federal investment in science can translate into shared research infrastructure, student training, regional economic development and new tools for fields ranging from human health to agriculture.

The promise is not simply to make experiments easier, but to change the pace at which they can be done. “We’ve seen years of work become weeks of work,” Jacob Gardner, Assistant Professor in Computer and Information Science, told McCormick.

During his tour, Senator McCormick, second from left, learned about the collaboration between Penn Engineering and Infinifluidics, a startup co-founded by David Issadore, at left. Also pictured are Infinifluidics engineer Owen Land (Gr’25), at right, and NSF AIRFoundry user facility director Benjamin Davis, second from right. (Credit: Sylvia Zhang)

Building the Infrastructure for Faster Discovery

That acceleration is the premise behind the NSF AIRFoundry, an $18-million effort led by Penn Engineering to combine artificial intelligence, automation and RNA science.

Opened earlier this spring, the facility brings together Penn Engineering, Penn Medicine’s Institute for RNA Innovation, the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez, Drexel University, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and startup InfiniFluidics to make RNA research faster, more scalable and more accessible.

During the tour, McCormick saw how that mission depends on more than any single piece of equipment. Researchers showcased systems for creating lipid nanoparticles, producing RNA and automating experiments that would otherwise require painstaking manual work. Each piece of equipment feeds into a larger cycle: experiments generate data, data trains AI models and AI models help researchers decide which experiments to try next.

The same approach could eventually extend to other fields. “We plan to go beyond medicine,” said David Issadore, Professor in BE, noting that AI-guided discovery could support research into optical particles, imaging technologies, new kinds of lighting and other nanomaterials. “From a research perspective, we’re exploring as many directions as we can.”

From left: NSF AIRFoundry User Facility Director Benjamin Davis; George J. Pappas, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation in Electrical and Systems Engineering and Penn Engineering’s Associate Dean for Research; Senator McCormick; David F. Meaney, Solomon R. Pollack Professor in Bioengineering and Penn’s Vice Provost for Research; and Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Director of the NSF AIRFoundry. (Credit: Sylvia Zhang)

Supporting Penn’s Leadership in AI

After the tour, McCormick and the assembled faculty discussed how Penn’s leadership in AI depends not only on advances in computing, but on the physical infrastructure, interdisciplinary training and federal research support needed to turn AI into a tool for discovery.

At the end of the visit, McCormick offered his support and thanked the researchers for their leadership. “Every time I come to Penn for a visit,” he said, “I just leave inspired by the incredible discoveries and progress.”

To learn more about the NSF AIRFoundry, please visit the facility’s website.