EFRCs to provide big down payment for materials research

First, I apologize for the length of this post (I’ve saved it for the weekend), but one of biggest “sleeper” stories in science in a long time is the DOE’s announcement concerning the establishment of 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers. These EFRCs have just been commissioned to focus work on a list of “grand challenges” (not to be confused with the NAE’s engineering Grand Challenges) related to fundamental breakthroughs needed for a new generation of “production, conversion, storage, transmission and waste mitigation.”

In particular, scientists have identified five major challenges:

•    How do we control material processes at the level of electrons?
•    How do we design and perfect atom- and energy-efficient synthesis of revolutionary new forms of matter with tailored properties?
•    How can we master energy and information on the nanoscale to create new technologies with capabilities rivaling those of living things?
•    How do remarkable properties of matter emerge from complex correlations of the atomic or electronic  constituents and how do we control these properties?
•    How do we characterize and control matter away – especially very far away – from equilibrium?

In an interview I did two months ago with John Hemminger, who chairs the DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, Hemminger said, “there are these fundamental science roadblocks that we just don’t understand enough about how nature works to do what we want to do. That requires fundamental research. This needs to occur, along with the traditional applied technology and engineering research.”

Hemminger, who is also the dean at UCal-Irvine, said the time is ripe because of recent advances in control science. “We’ve developed capabilities to do certain materials engineering at an atomistic, nanometer-scale level combined with revolutionary computational abilities to predict materials properties in advanced of making them. We are at the dawn of a new age called control science, where we can say, ‘these are the properties we need,’ we can predict what the materials need to be like, and we have a way to make them,” he said. “Fundamental understanding of complex materials is essential to crating new energy strategies.”

Conceptually, the EFRCs are to be “dream teams,” for materials research. Explained Hemminger, “These are supposed to be multi-investigator, multi-institutional collaborator groups. These are not brick and mortar entities but collaborations among scientists at universities, national labs and industry that are focused on one or more of the research needs and grant challenge reports. The idea is to encourage the [scientific] community to gather together in collective groups to focus on well-defined, fundamental problems. This started the idea of dream teams composed of the right experimentalists, regardless of whether they are at the same institution.”

The creation of the EFRCs is good news for young scientists. There is a lot of enthusiasm for energy research around universities, but because of the downturn in endowment revenue, etc., many have had hiring freezes. As a result, postdoc opportunities have plummeted. Fortunately, the EFRCs will open up many new ones.

The DOE estimates that the EFRCs will employ 700 senior investigators plus an additional 1100 researchers, postdocs, grad students, undergrads and technical staff.

Sustaining funding will be key to the success of the overall EFRC effort, because there tends to be five-year frameworks to these kinds of projects. George Crabtree, director of the Material Science Division of Argonne National Lab and cochair of BESAC’s Subcommittee on Facing Our Energy Challenges, told me a while back that, “there’s been something like a billion dollars worth of proposals received, so we can’t fund them all, but funding one-quarter of them would be a great down payment.”

I am sure Crabtree was happy to learn that Congress and the Obama administration are funding closer to one-third of the projects. There are two revenue streams involved. First, $100 million is coming from the Fiscal Year 2009 budget to fund 30 EFRCs. DOE is planning on obtaining and additional $400 million in future federal budgets to provide five-years worth of funding. The second revenue stream is $277 million coming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to fund 16 projects. These 16 ARRA projects are fully funded for five years.

As I mention above, the EFRCs are meant to be collaborative entities, not necessarily physical centers. Indeed, although there are 46 EFRCs, they span 110 institutions, 36 states plus the District of Columbia, and eight nations besides the United States.

Having noted that, here is a state-by-state breakdown of the EFRCs. Details of the projects can be found here, and there is a handy FAQ on the EFRCs here.