Energy Frontier Research Centers - NOI

The EFRC program brings together diverse world-class teams of scientists to perform energy-relevant, basic research with a scope and complexity beyond what is possible in single-investigator or small-group awards. These multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary centers accelerate transformative scientific advances for the most challenging topics in materials sciences, chemical sciences, geosciences, and biosciences. EFRCs conduct fundamental research to address grand challenges identified in the report Directing Matter and Energy: Five Challenges for Science and the Imagination (December 2007) and transformative opportunities identified in the report Challenges at the Frontiers of Matter and Energy: Transformative Opportunities for Discovery Science (November 2015). In addition, EFRCs perform use-inspired basic research to fill scientific knowledge gaps identified in major strategic planning efforts by BES and the scientific community (see below). EFRCs integrate synthesis, characterization, theory, computation, and data science; develop innovative experimental and theoretical tools that illuminate fundamental processes in unprecedented detail; and create an enthusiastic, inter-disciplinary, diverse community of energy-focused scientists.