US Department of Energy celebrates 10 years at the frontiers of energy research
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US Department of Energy celebrates 10 years at the frontiers of energy research science.osti.gov/bes/efrc
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to store it, and advance technologies that increase energy efficiency, all of which involve substantial materials research. The 10-year anniversary of the EFRC program provides an opportunity to look back at the successes of the program, and look toward its future. In conjunction with the anniversary, DOE has announced winners of its video contest about the science, innovations, and people of the EFRCs as well as the “Ten at Ten Awards,” which recognizes people, scientific ideas, and tools and technologies that exemplify the impact of the EFRCs (see Table I). Several of the award recipients are materials researchers and engineers—a testament to the importance of materials in solving the energy challenges of the 21st century. Fall writes that the EFRCs were “an experiment in the management of basic research that has since paid huge dividends …” —a statement that is backed by the numbers. In just a decade, the EFRC program has awarded nearly USD$1.6 billion in funding to support 82 centers, 46 of which are currently active. These centers have focused on the range of energy challenges and have together produced over 11,600 peer-reviewed publications as well as a variety of novel ideas and technologies (including 650+ invention disclosures, 550+ US patent applications, 400+ nonUS patent appliThe 2019 EFRC Booklet and other resources are available at the cations, and 180+ US Department of Energy Office of Science website: science.osti. issued patents as gov/bes/efrc. of 2019).
he US Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) Program turned 10 in 2019, and in an article to mark the milestone, Director of the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Chris Fall writes that “this challenge is a scientific one, but it’s also a management one – How do you bring together, empower, and support the creative, multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional scientific teams needed to tackle the toughest scientific challenges preventing advances in energy technologies?” Unsurprisingly, Fall’s answer is through the EFRC program, which seeks to transform the energy landscape by both building effective teams and ensuring these teams have access to a breadth of tools to better understand and control energy-relevant materials. The Office of Basic Energy Science within DOE launched the EFRC program in 2009 in response to the accelerating global demand for energy. To meet the energy needs of the future, researchers are working to find new ways to collect and generate energy, develop better means
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In addition to publications and the generation of intellectual property, the EFRCs have engaged scientists and researchers from more than 170 institutions. With a focus on both utilizing expertise and building the future energyscience workforce, supported researchers have hailed from a number of fields and career levels, including over 1600 senior investigators and more than 5400 students or postdoctoral researchers. “The most signif
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