Dr. Liu Awarded NSF FINDERS Foundry Grant to Pioneer AI-Powered STEM Exploration for K-12 Students

We are thrilled to announce that the Dr. Liu at California State University, Long Beach has been awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF Award #2627676) through the FINDERS Foundry program.

Led by Dr. Tairan Liu, this project aims to break down barriers to personalized STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) exploration for K-12 students. While many young students are deeply curious about STEM, they frequently lack access to hands-on opportunities that match their specific interests or developmental needs.

To bridge the gap between students’ emerging interests and distributed STEM resources, our multidisciplinary team is developing an innovative, AI-powered platform. The system will discover students’ STEM interests through guided conversations, build structured student profiles, and match them with tangible, hands-on STEM experiences at university laboratories, industry facilities, and community organizations.

At the core of this novel platform is a five-component architecture:

• Conversational Interest Discovery: Interpreting student curiosity dynamically.
• Structured Student Profiling: Assessing developmental readiness and individual needs.
• Dynamic STEM Resource Graph: Mapping available STEM opportunities across various institutions.
• Constraint-Aware Matching: Ensuring recommendations account for real-world logistical barriers.
• Reinforcement Learning Feedback: Continuously refining and improving the experience connections.

A central pillar of this project is our co-design methodology. We are embedding K-12 educators and parents directly into the development process alongside experts in robotics, AI, STEM academic pathways, K-12 evaluation, and family engagement. This collaborative approach ensures the technology genuinely addresses practical barriers—such as transportation, scheduling, awareness, and trust—and remains generalizable across diverse educational contexts.

By giving students a meaningful way to explore STEM early, this project supports national goals to broaden participation and build strong future pathways in science and engineering. For more information, you can view the official award abstract on the NSF website: NSF Award #2627676.

Stay tuned to the PACK Lab website for more updates as we begin this exciting work!