U.S. Department of Energy – Energy Frontier Research Centers

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Location: Richland, Washington
EFRC Name: Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis
Director: R. Morris Bullock
Objective: Develop a comprehensive understanding of how chemical and electrical energy contained in fuels in exchanged, stored and released.

The William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., is the U.S. Department of Energy's newest national scientific user facility.

Idaho National Laboratory
Location: Idaho Falls, Idaho
EFRC Name: Center for Materials Science of Nuclear Fuel
Director: Dieter Wolf
Objective: Develop predictive computational models, validated by experiments, for the thermal and mechanical behavior of analogues to nuclear fuel.

Among the acres of nuclear energy test facilities at the Idaho National Laboratory is the Hot Fuels Examination Facility (HFEF).

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Location: Berkeley, California
EFRC Name: Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO₂
Director: Donald DePaolo
Objective: Establish scientific foundations for the geological storage of carbon dioxide.

Berkeley Lab is located on a 200-acre site in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus, has a staff of approximately 4,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $520 million. Berkeley Lab enjoys a shared history and relationship with UC that is unique among the DOE national laboratories.

photo courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

University of California, Berkeley
Location: Berkeley, California
EFRC Name: Center for Gas Separations Relevant to Clean Evergy Technologies
Director: Berend Smit
Objective: Design and synthesize new forms of matter with tailored properties for gas separations in applications including carbon capture and sequestration.

Stanford University
Location: Stanford, California
EFRC Name: Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion
Director: Fritz Prinz
Objective: Design, create, and characterize materials at the nanoscale for a wide variety of energy applications.

University of California, Santa Barbara*
Location: Santa Barbara, California
EFRC Name: Center on Materials for Energy Efficiency Applications
Director: John Bowers
Objective: Discover and develop materials that control the interatictions between light, electricity, and heat at the nanoscale for improved solar energy conversion, solid-state lighting, and conversion of heat into electricity.

California Institute of Technology
Location: Pasadena, California
EFRC Name: Light-Material Interactions in Energy Conversion
Director: Harry Atwater
Objective: Tailor the properties of advanced materials to control the flow of solar energy and heat.

Kerckhoff Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology
photo courtesy of California Institute of Technology

University of California, Los Angeles
Location: Los Angeles, California
EFRC Name: Molecularly Assembled Material Architectures for solar Energy Production, Storage, and Carbon Capture
Director: Vidvuds Ozolins
Objective: Acquire a fundamental understanding and control of nanoscale material arhitectures for conversion of solar energy to electricity, electrical energy storage, and separating/capturing greenhouse gases.

University of Southern California*
Location: Los Angeles, California
EFRC Name: Emerging Materials for Solar Energy Conversion and Solid State Lighting
Director: Paul Daniel Dapkus
Objective: Simultaneously explore the light absorbing and emitting properties of hybrid inorganic-organic materials for solar energy conversion and solid-state lighting.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Location: Golden, Colorado
EFRC Name: Center for Inverse Design
Director: Alex Zunger
Objective: Replace trial-and-error methods used in the development of materials for solar energy conversion with an inverse design approach powered by theory and computation.

This photo shows the Thermal Test Facility, Outdoor Test Facility, Field Test Laboratory Building, Solar Energy Research Facility, Science & Technology Facility and Camp George West, all on the campus of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
photo by Patrick Corkery, courtesy of NREL

Arizona State University*
Location: Tempe, Arizona
EFRC Name: EFR Center for Bio-Inspired Solar Fuel Production
Director: J. Devens Gust
Objective: Adapt the fundamental principles of natural photosynthesis to the man-made production of hydrogen or other fuels from sunlight.

University of Arizona*
Location: Tuscon, Arizona
EFRC Name: Center for Interface Science: Hybrid Solar-Electric Materials (CIS:HSEM)
Director: Neal R. Armstrong
Objective: Enhance the conversion of solar energy to electricity using hybrid inorganic-organic materials.

Carnegie Institute of Washington
Location: Washington, D.C.
EFRC Name: Center for Energy Frontier Research in Extreme Environments (Efree)
Director: Ho-Kwang Mao
Objective: Accelerate the discovery of energy-relevant materials that can tolerate transient extremems in pressure and temperature

The quadrangle at Washington University, home to a new EFRC dedicated to photosynthetic antenna research.
photo by David Claborn

University of Delaware*
Location: Newark, Delaware
EFRC Name: Rational Design of Innovative Catalytic Technologies for Biomass Derivative Utilization
Director: Dionisios Vlachos
Objective: Design and characterize novel catalysts for the efficient conversion of the complex molecules comprising biomass into chemicals and fuels.

Argonne National Laboratory
Location: Argonne, Illinios
EFRC Name: Institute for Atom-
Efficient Chemical Transformations
Director: Christopher Marshall
Objective: Discover, understand, and control efficient chemical pathways form the conversion of coal and biomass into chemicals and fuels.

Argonne National Laboratory
Location: Argonne, Illinios
EFRC Name: Center for Electrical Energy Storage: Tailored Interfaces
Director: Michael Thackeray
Objective: Understand complex phenomena in electrochemical reactions critical to advanced electrical energy storage.

The Advanced Photon Source is one of many distinctive features at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, which is involved in three separate EFRCs, including one in partnership with Northwestern University in nearby Evanston.
photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory

Northwestern University*
Location: Evanston, Illinios
EFRC Name: Center for Integrated Training in Far-From-Equilibrium and Adaptive Materials
Director: Bartosz Grzybowski
Objective: Synthesize, characterize, and understand new classes of materials under conditions far from equlibrium relevant to solar energy conversion, storage of electricity and hydrogen, and catalysis.

Northwestern University
Location: Evanston, Illinios
EFRC Name: Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center (ANSER)
Director: Michael Waisielewski
Objective: Revolutionize the design, sytnthesis, and control of molecules, materials, and processes in order to dramatically improve conversion of sunlight into electricity and fuels.

Purdue University*
Location: West Lafayette, Indiana
EFRC Name: Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio)
Director: Maureen McCann
Objective: Use fundamental knowledge about the interactions between catalysts and plant cell walls to design improved processes for the conversion of biomass to energy, fuels, or chemicals.

University of Notre Dame*
Location: Notre Dame, Indiana
EFRC Name: Materials Science of Actinides
Director: Peter C. Burns
Objective: Understand and control, at the nanoscale, materials that contain actinides (radioactive heavy elements such as uranium and plutonium) to lay the scientific foundation for the advanced nuclear energy systems.

Louisiana State University
Location: Baton Rouge, Louisiana
EFRC Name: Coputational Catalysis and Atomic-Level Synthesis of Materials: Building Effective Catalysts from First Principles
Director: James Spivey
Objective: Develop computational tools to accurately model catalytic reactions and thereby provide the basis for the design of new catalysts.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology*
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
EFRC Name: Center for Excitonics
Director: Marc Baldo
Objective: Understand the transport of charge carriers in synthetic disordered systems, which hold promise as new materials for conversion of solar energy to elecricity and electrical energy storage.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
EFRC Name: Solid-State Solar-thermal Energy Conversion Center (S3TEC CENTER)
Director: Gang Chen
Objective: Create novel, solid-state materials for the conversion of sunlight and heat into electricity.

photo courtesy MIT

University of Massachusetts*
Location: Amherst, Massachusetts
EFRC Name: Polymer-Based Materials for Harvesting Solar Energy
Director: Thomas Russell
Objective: Use novel, self-assembled polymer materials in systems for the conversion of sunlight into elecricity.

University of Maryland
Location: College Park, Maryland
EFRC Name: Science of Precisions Multifunctional Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage
Director: Gary Rubloff
Objective: Understand and build nano-structured electrode components as the foundation for new electrical energy storage technologies.

Michigan State University
Location: East Lansing, Michigan
EFRC Name: Revolutionary Materials for Solid State Energy Conversion
Director: Donald Morelli
Objective: Investigate the underlying physical and chemical principles of advanced materials for the conversion of heat into electricity.

University of Michigan*
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
EFRC Name: Solar Energy Conversion in Complex Materials (SECCM)
Director: Peter Green
Objective: Study complex material structures on teh nanoscale to identify key features for their potential use as materials to convert solar energy and heat to electricity.

Spring 2009 comes to Central Campus at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
photo by Lin Jones, courtesy of University of Michigan News Services

Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
EFRC Name: Center for Advanced Biofuels Systems
Director: Richard Sayre
Objective: Generate the fundamental knowledge required to increase the efficiencey of photosynthesis and production of energy-rich moecules in plants.

Washington University, St. Louis
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
EFRC Name: Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center
Director: Robert Blankenship
Objective: Understand the basic scientific principles that underlie the efficient functioning of the natural photosythetic atenna system as a basis for man-made systems to convert sunlight into fuels.

University of North Carolina*
Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina
EFRC Name: Solar Fuels and Next Generation Photovoltaics
Director: Thomas Meyer
Objective: Synthesize new molecular catalysts and light absorbers and integrate them into nanoscale architectures for improved generation of fuels and electricity from sunlight.

Princeton University
Location: Princeton, New Jersey
EFRC Name: Energy Frontier Research Center for Combustion Science
Director: Chung K. Law
Objective: Develop a suite of predictive combustion modeling capabilities for the chemical design and utilization of non-petroleum based fuels in transportation.

The East Pyne Archway on the campus of Princeton University, which will be host to an EFRC focused on combustion of non-petroleum based fuels.
photo by Mahlon Lovett, courtesy of Office of Communications, Princeton University

Los Alamos National Laboratory
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
EFRC Name: Extreme Environment-Tolerant Materials via Atomic Scale Design of Interfaces
Director: Michael Nastasi
Objective: Understand, at the atomic scale, the behavior of materials subject to extreme radiation doses and mechanical stress in order to synthesize new materials that maintain their desired properties under such conditions.

Los Alamos National Laboratory
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
EFRC Name: The Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics
Director: Victor Klimov
Objective: Capitalize on recent advances in the science of how nanoparticles interact with light to design materials that have vastly greater efficiencies for the conversion of sunlight into electricity.

Sandia National Laboratories
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico
EFRC Name: EFRC for Solid State Lighting Science
Director: Jerry Simmons
Objective: Study energy conversion in tailored nanostructures as a basis for dramatically improved solid-state lighting.

Located on the grounds of Kirtland Air Force Base, ' Microlab building opened in early 2006 and is one of three facilities that make up the half-billion-dollar Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications (MESA) project.

Brookhaven National Laboratory
Location: Upton, New York
EFRC Name: Center for Emergent Superconductivity
Director: J.C. Seamus Davis
Objective: By understanding the fundamental physics of superconductivity, discover new high-temperature superconductors and improve the performance of known superconductors.

In addition to the Center for Emergent Superconductivity EFRC, Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., in mid-June was host to the groundbreaking for the new National Synchrotron Light Source II (above left). The original NSLS (above right) attracts about 2,500 scientists each year from academia, industry and other labs to use the facility's powerful x-rays, ultraviolet and infrared light.

Columbia University*
Location: New York, New York
EFRC Name: Re-Defining Photovoltaic Efficiency Through Molecule-Scale Control
Director: James Yardley
Objective: Develop the enabling science needed to realize breakthroughs in the efficient conversion of sunlight into electricity in nanometer sized thin films.

Cornell University*
Location: Ithaca, New York
EFRC Name: Nanostructured Interfaces for Energy Generation, Conversion, and Storage
Director: Hector Abruna
Objective: Understand and control the nature, structure, and dynamics of reactions at electrodes in fuel cells, batteries, solar photovolatiaics, and catalysts.

Cornell's Ithaca campus (left), home to an EFRC focused on nanostructured interfaces, occupies 745 acres on a hill overlooking Cayuga Lake, in the scenic Finger Lakes region of central New York state. The Pew Sundial (right) forms a striking foreground to Duffield Hall, the center of Cornell's research in the emerging discoveries and applications of nanotechnology.
Photo Credit: University Photography

General Electric Global Research Center
Location: Niskayuna, New York
EFRC Name: Center for Electrocatalysis, Transport Phenomina and Materials for Innovative Energy Storage
Director: Grigorii Soloveichik
Objective: Explore the fundamental chemistry needed for an entirely new approach to energy storage that combines the best properties of a fuel cell and a flow battery.

The GE Global Research campus in Niskayuna, N.Y., is the only private-sector campus among the 46 EFRC host sites across the country.

State University of New York, Stony Brook
Location: Stony Brook, New York
EFRC Name: Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center (NOCESC)
Director: Clare P. Grey
Objective: Understand how fundamental chemical reactions occur at electrodes and use that knowledge to tailor new electrodes to improve the performance of existing batteries or to design entirely new ones.

Pennsylvania State University*
Location: University Park, Pennsylvania
EFRC Name: Center fo Lignocellulose Structure and Formation
Director: Daniel Cosgrove
Objective: Dramatically increase or fundamental knowledge of the physical structure of bio-polymers in plant cell walls to provide a basis for improved methods for converting biomass into fuels

The life science bridge complex on the campus of Pennsylvania State University in College Station, Pa., where an EFRC focused on lignocellulose structure and formation will be located.
photo by Greg Grieco

University of South Carolina
Location: Columbia, South Carolina
EFRC Name: Science Based Nano-Structure Design and Synthesis of Heterogeneous Functional Materials for Energy Systems
Director: Kenneth Reifsnider
Objective: Build a scienfific basis for bridging the gap between making nano-structured materials and understanding how they function in a variety of energy applications.

The University of South Carolina has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to house a research center that is expected to bring $12.5 million in federal funding, the largest award in the university�s history, to a team of internationally recognized energy researchers in the College of Engineering and Computing. Led by Dr. Ken Reifsnider (above), director of the University of South Carolina's Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Center of Excellence, the new EFRC on campus will focus on designing and creating materials essential for engineering devices such as fuel cells, electrolyzers, electrodes, photovoltaics, combustion devices, fuel-processing devices and functional membranes and coatings, with an emphasis on understanding the nano-structure and functionality of such materials

Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Location: Oak Ridge, Tennessee
EFRC Name: Fluid Interface Reactions, Stuctures and Transport (FIRST) Center
Director: David Wesolowski
Objective: Provide basic scientific understanding of phenomena that occur at interfaces in electrical energy storage, conversion of sunlight into fuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, and other advanced energy systems.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Location: Oak Ridge, Tennessee
EFRC Name: Energy Frontier Center for Defect Physics in Structural Materials (CDP)
Director: Malcom G. Stocks
Objective: Enhance our fundamental understanding of defects, defect interactions, and defect dynamics that determine the performance of structural alloys in extreme radiation environments.

The Spallation Neutron Source is one of the newest amenities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., which will host two EFRCs.

University of Texas, Austin*
Location: Austin, Texas
EFRC Name: Understanding Charge Separation and Transfer at Interfaces in Energy Materials and Devices (CST)
Director: Paul Barbara
Objective: Pursue fundamental research on charge transfer processes that underpin the function of highly promising molecular materials for photovoltaic and electrical energy storage applications.

University of Texas, Austin
Location: Austin, Texas
EFRC Name: Frontiers of Subsurface Energy Security
Director: Gary A. Pope
Objective: Harness recent theoretical and experimental advances to explain the transport of native and injected fluids, particularly carbon dioxide, in geological systems over multiple lenght scales.

University of Virginia
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia
EFRC Name: Center for Catalytic Hydrocarbon Functionalization
Director: T. Brent Gunnoe
Objective: Develop novel catalysts and manipulate their reactivity for the effecient conversion of hydrocarbon gases into liquid fuels.