Fayetteville State University has received $10 million to build an artificial intelligence research program that university leaders said could position the school as a greater resource for the defense industry around Fort Bragg—and expand the university’s growing research capacity.
The federal funding is the largest single research award in the school’s history.
The five-year award from the U.S. Defense Department’s Research and Education Program for Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions, would provide FSU with $2 million annually to establish an interdisciplinary research program focused on applied artificial intelligence for defense systems, contested logistics, and biomanufacturing.
The project would also lay the groundwork for a new doctoral program in applied AI for defense systems, hire two research faculty members, and provide research opportunities for at least five graduate students and five undergraduate students each year, with the potential to involve more.
For FSU, however, the ambitions extend beyond a single grant or research project.
In 2025, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education designated FSU a Research University for the first time, recognizing the university’s growing research activity. The new federal grant comes with research-capacity deliverables over its five-year period, and Sambit Bhattacharya, a professor of computer science and co-principal investigator on the project, said the award provides another opportunity for FSU to continue expanding its research capacity.
“We will propel ourselves in that direction,” Bhattacharya said.
Bhattacharya already has experience conducting defense-related AI research. He has worked with the XVIII Airborne Corps on artificial intelligence research addressing operational needs at Fort Bragg, a project supported by state funds from NCInnovation. He also has spent about a decade participating in fellowships with Navy, Army, and intelligence community research laboratories, according to Bhattacharya.
Ganesh Bora, the project’s principal investigator and FSU’s associate vice chancellor for research and innovation, said university leaders knew they would be entering a competitive field when they pursued the federal funding.
The funding opportunity identified six areas of defense-related research: applied AI, biomanufacturing, logistics, hypersonics, quantum research, and scaled directed energy. FSU was one of only five projects selected nationally for funding.
“We took a chance,” Bora said.
Part of FSU’s strategy was to build its proposal around several areas where faculty members had expertise and existing or pending research funding.
“We thought we have expertise in bio, expertise in logistics, so we thought that we should go for it,” Bora said.
The result was a proposal combining applied AI, biomanufacturing, and logistics.
“At the end of the day, it was very competitive,” Bora said.
The $10 million far surpasses FSU’s previous record for a single research grant—a $2 million National Science Foundation award during the 2025-26 academic year.
“This is kind of a very big feat to our faculty in the university,” Bora said. “This is the largest research grant the university has ever received.”
Eventually, he said, defense and civilian leaders could “bank on FSU” for expertise in areas covered by the project, including AI models, synthetic data, and technologies that could be used to identify damaged equipment on a battlefield.
“The impact of the university in the community as a defense expert on AI,” Bora said, is among the project’s goals.
Work on the five-year project is expected to begin once FSU finalizes its contract with the Defense Department.
A First-of-Its-Kind Applied AI Degree
At the center of the project is something FSU does not currently have: a doctoral program built around applying artificial intelligence to real-world defense problems.
Bhattacharya emphasized the distinction between studying artificial intelligence itself and developing AI that can be put to work.
“It is not a Ph.D. in AI as such,” Bhattacharya said. “It’s a Ph.D. in applied AI, which is kind of unique.”
The emphasis, he said, is on developing technology with an end user in mind rather than conducting research that stops in the laboratory.
“We want to build AI software, mainly software, but there could be other things, too, and put it in the hands of the user,” Bhattacharya said. “The user is the most important thing here. It is user-facing, and user-oriented.”
That research could include large language models, computer vision, robotics, and other forms of what Bhattacharya described as “physical AI.”
AI is already changing how people write, code, communicate, and perform other digital tasks, he said. Bhattacharya said he expected a similar transformation to eventually occur in the physical world through robotics.
“Pretty soon, robotics is going to have its own boom, just like ChatGPT and, let’s say, Claude had its own boom,” Bhattacharya said.
Computer vision would allow AI to see and analyze visual information, while physical AI could incorporate robotics and other technology that interacts with the world around it. Those technologies, along with large language models and other AI systems, could become part of both FSU’s research and the proposed doctoral program.
The doctoral program is not ready to enroll students yet.
Bhattacharya said FSU already developed a draft curriculum as part of its grant proposal, but establishing the program will require several layers of approval. The proposal would move through departmental, college, university, and UNC System review before ultimately requiring approval through the university’s accrediting process.
The curriculum could also change along the way depending on faculty expertise and availability, he said. Students, however, will not necessarily have to wait for the Ph.D. program to be established to participate in the research.
Bora said FSU can begin recruiting student researchers once the university signs its contract for the federal award.
“We may not have the Ph.D. program approved, but we can recruit a student,” Bora said. “They can start working.”
The project is expected to support at least five graduate students and five undergraduate students each year, with the potential to involve more, according to Bhattacharya.
From Battlefield Logistics to Hurricane Response
One of the project’s central research areas—contested logistics—can sound abstract. Burcu Adivar, a professor and associate dean in FSU’s College of Business and Economics and another co-principal investigator, offered a more concrete example of the kinds of problems researchers hope artificial intelligence can help solve.
Imagine U.S. troops moving along a planned route when a bridge ahead of them is bombed and suddenly becomes unusable.
During conflicts decades ago, Adivar said, information about the destroyed bridge could take 30 to 40 minutes to reach a joint forces command. From there, military leaders would still need to determine how troops or supplies should be rerouted.
AI, combined with newer sensors and other technologies, could dramatically shorten that process by rapidly processing information about changing conditions and identifying an alternative route.
“Now with AI and with these new technologies, new sensors, it will take seconds,” Adivar said.
That ability to analyze changing conditions and make logistical decisions quickly illustrates one way FSU researchers envision applying AI to defense systems. But Adivar said the same underlying technology could have uses far beyond the battlefield.
She pointed to the devastation of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina in 2024 as another example.
After the disaster, Adivar said, a pilot contacted her and asked whether she could analyze telecommunications data to help determine where people were located at the time of the storm.
“Yes, sure, we can do that, but it would take at least a week,” Adivar recalled responding.
Research developed through the new program could eventually allow AI agents to perform that type of analysis much faster, she said.
“Now, with this study, these research outputs, we can create AI agents that can do it in minutes,” Adivar said.
The information could then be used to more quickly assess where people are and what assistance they need after a disaster.
“AI can help us to do better needs assessment, and we can provide a very, very quick response to save those lives,” Adivar said.
Bhattacharya has already worked on another North Carolina application of AI: predicting storm surge from hurricanes.
Through previous Department of Homeland Security-funded research, Bhattacharya said he worked with the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill to develop AI-based storm surge predictors. The research examines factors such as a hurricane’s intensity and direction to anticipate how high water could rise along the coast.
The goal is to give emergency officials better information before a storm hits, particularly when deciding where evacuations are most necessary.
“You cannot evacuate everyone, apparently,” Bhattacharya said. “So that’s a huge—it would be a huge effort.”
He described the research as “building resilience towards hurricane disasters even before they happen.”
From Fort Bragg to Big Tech
The expertise FSU hopes to develop through the project is aimed at the defense sector, but university researchers say students trained through it would not be limited to military careers.
Bora said the combination of artificial intelligence, logistics, and biomanufacturing could prepare students to become part of what he described as a “high-level intellectual workforce.”
“As a result of going through this program and taking advantage of this opportunity, students will become part of the workforce, a high-level intellectual workforce,” Bora said.
The defense connection is an obvious one. Bora said students coming through the proposed program should be prepared to enter a sector that increasingly relies on advanced research and technical expertise.
But he sees a much broader range of possibilities.
“They’ll have an easy path to be in the defense sector, but their background in AI, biomanufacturing and logistics can take them anywhere,” Bora said.
That could include private industry or eventually academia, where some graduates could return to universities as professors, he said.
“The bottom line is there’ll be a very strong technically capable workforce,” Bora said.
Bhattacharya pointed to technology companies as another potential destination.
He said doctoral-level expertise is increasingly valuable for research and leadership positions involving artificial intelligence, including jobs outside traditional technology companies.
“Our students will be very capable of joining big tech companies with very high salaries and high impact,” Bhattacharya said.
Banking and other industries also employ Ph.D.-level researchers for in-house research and development, he said.
For FSU, that means a research program conceived around defense needs could ultimately produce graduates whose expertise extends well beyond them—from Fort Bragg and the broader defense sector to technology companies, private industry, and university classrooms.
