UChicago CASE
Strategic Initiatives
Joint Task Force Initiative (JTFI)
JTFI was founded in 2018 to help Argonne and Fermilab achieve mission success by opening channels of frequent communication and collaboration across institutions.
JTFI has created several joint task forces, strategic initiatives, and training opportunities that provide critical support of the national labs.
UChicago commits resources to JTFI AI for Science initiative for matchmaking workshops between AI and other fields, offering research opportunities to students, consulting experiences, and funding joint AI projects.
The Joint Task Force Initiative (JTFI) at the University of Chicago collaborates with Argonne National Laboratory through the ‘Argonne in the City’ program, constituting a long-term strategic effort. This program aims to bring the expertise and resources of Argonne to urban communities, focusing on education, workforce development, and community engagement. Through various projects and partnerships, Argonne in the City works to address challenges and promote innovation.
This strategic initiative aids a next-generation ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment, with crucial involvement from Argonne and Fermilab, alongside other national laboratories and universities. UChicago’s support includes investment in capital equipment for an Argonne clean room, provision of bridge funding, and provision of office space for the CMB-S4 planning group at 53rd Street in Chicago.
JTFI hired an external consulting firm for a six-month engagement to assist Fermilab in identifying and addressing performance challenges in the mission-critical support areas of procurement, facilities, finance and human resources.
How can we ensure that people around the world have access to the reliable, affordable energy needed for economic growth and human development without putting the environment, climate or human health at risk? In answer to this challenge question, JTFI funded four joint projects at UChicago and Argonne over two years that are answering this challenge question using diverse ideas and experiments.
This initiative is focused on developing infrastructure to serve as a model for STEM education program delivery and execution in emerging scientific areas (e.g., Data Science/AI, Clean Energy, Quantum) across South Side Chicago communities, in partnership with community-based organizations, local schools, and civic partners. JTFI is providing support for a pilot phase that will take an existing in-person STEM education program, led by the University of Chicago and the National Labs, and identify pathways to scale.
Argonne is making significant research contributions to advance radioisotope production and purification technologies, and UChicago offers a broad spectrum of basic, translational, and clinical research environment and expertise in radiochemistry, cellular, preclinical, and clinical trial studies. JTFI funded a joint year 1 research project on scandium radiotheranostics to improve the diagnosis and therapy of advanced prostate cancer. This year, JTFI has funded a new project on developing novel radiotheranostics for improved diagnosis and therapy of neuroendocrine tumors, which involve many types of cancer.
Projects supported by this initiative cut across our topic areas: Energy Technologies, Microelectronics, High-Throughput Autonomous Discovery, and AI-Microelectronics for Advanced Scientific Instrumentation.The JTFI has provided funding to research projects with an aim of deepening collaborative research opportunities among the University, Argonne, and Fermilab, positioning the projects to successfully scale and secure large-scale sponsored research funding, and accelerating the development of transformational research and technology that deliver high-impact results to society.
JTFI seeded four novel research teams that use techniques like machine learning and advanced imaging methods to create more sustainable materials and conduct basic science research.
JTFI seeded four novel research teams that use techniques like machine learning and advanced imaging methods to create more sustainable materials and conduct basic science research.
JTFI issued a call for proposals in 2021 for proposals in such areas as environment fate of materials, AI/ML applied to sustainability, polymer circularity, carbon capture, biotechnology, green batteries, sensing technology and sustainability, resource recovery, critical material life cycle analysis, and solar technology. Four proposals were funded in 2022 with a potential second year of support.