The next big Chicago-area lab could be run from a browser. Northwestern University has landed $20 million from the National Science Foundation to build what it says will be the nation’s first publicly accessible, AI-powered cloud lab dedicated to protein engineering, giving researchers a remote way to design, build and test proteins without owning a robot-packed facility.
The four-year award will create the AI-Driven, Rapid, Experimental Automation Machine, or DREAM Cloud Lab, according to Crain’s Chicago Business. “Publicly accessible” here means access for researchers, startups and industry partners—not a walk-in science museum with a gift shop full of protein keychains.
The Lab Will Turn Protein Design Into A Remote Workflow
The National Science Foundation says its programmable cloud laboratories will let users remotely access advanced instruments and run custom, AI-enabled workflows. At Northwestern, that means software could propose protein designs, while robotic systems build and test them after biosafety and biosecurity reviews, with the resulting data fed back into the models, as outlined by the National Science Foundation.
Northwestern Already Has The Robotics Backbone
DREAM will be housed inside Northwestern’s Synthetic Biology Foundry in Evanston, a shared facility equipped for automated liquid handling, high-throughput screening and protein characterization. The Foundry opened in 2025 and is designed around the “design-build-test-learn” cycle, according to Northwestern Engineering.
The setup gives the university a head start: The grant is expanding an existing research platform rather than dropping an AI lab into an empty room. The Foundry is also located near Northwestern’s Querrey InQbation Lab, connecting automated research with the university’s startup pipeline, Northwestern says.
The Four-Year Target Is 300,000 Proteins
Northwestern’s team expects DREAM to synthesize and characterize more than 300,000 proteins during the award period, generating as many as 30 million data points. The university says the resulting data and AI models will be released through an open-access framework, potentially giving researchers a shared base for work on medicines, sustainable materials, agriculture and other biotechnology applications, according to Northwestern Now.
Why The Project Matters For Chicago’s Biotech Scene
The award lands as Northwestern continues building a synthetic-biology ecosystem that blends engineering, medicine, entrepreneurship and public-private research. The university’s Center for Synthetic Biology says it now includes 21 faculty members and has helped launch seven startups, making the new cloud lab another potential bridge between Evanston research and commercial biotech, as detailed by the Northwestern Center for Synthetic Biology.
Part Of A Bigger National Self-Driving Lab Push
Northwestern’s award is one of 20 inaugural test beds in a broader NSF initiative focused on AI-enabled automated science. The agency announced $380 million in awards, alongside up to $20 million in philanthropic contributions, to build a national network of remotely accessible laboratories that share data, standards and research capabilities, according to the NSF announcement.
Outside researchers will not simply log in and unleash the robots on day one. The NSF program calls for recruitment and onboarding workshops, shared protocols and continued planning for how each node will operate after its four-year award, with the goal of opening sophisticated equipment to universities, companies and researchers that may not otherwise be able to afford it.
