How Five Scientists Will Use Stimulus Funds

Five of 69 young winners of an Energy Dept. program explain how their research might lead to breakthroughs in clean energy

By Justin Gerdes

One of Energy Secretary Steven Chu's top, if often overlooked, priorities has been to try to keep the U.S. from falling behind in the race to train the next generation of scientists and engineers to build tomorrow's energy technologies. "Strong support of scientists in the early career years is crucial to renewing America's scientific workforce and ensuring U.S. leadership in discovery and innovation for many years to come," Chu has said.

Earlier this month, Chu announced that 69 young researchers would receive up to $85 million in funding from the stimulus bill under the DOE's new Early Career Research Program. The five-year grants will cover salary and research expenses, and this year's awardees were selected by a panel of outside experts from a pool of 1,750 applicants. Earth2Tech asked five of the awardees to describe how their research might lead to tomorrow's clean-energy breakthroughs:

David Erickson, Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University:

Erickson specializes in taking techniques used in the telecommunications industry to shuttle light around and applying them to nanomaterials on a microchip. The goal, he says, is to "create a special kind of tweezer that can pick up and assemble tiny elements of matter into new materials"—basically a "light-based nano-assembly line." He says the research could lead to highly efficient photothermal and photoelectric energy conversion devices.

Patrick Yin Chiang, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Oregon State University:

Chiang is working to improve the energy efficiency of interconnections among the thousands of processors used for super computing—the power-hungry data crunching needed for, say, DNA sequencing or climate modeling. "It turns out that the energy consumed to make a computation is 10x less than the energy used to move that computed result somewhere else. This is the case at every level—within a single integrated microprocessor, connecting multiple chips in a single server, and connecting multiple servers in a data center," says Chiang. The goal of his research, he says, "is to tackle innovative circuit techniques that leverage Moore's Law scaling to reduce the energy of these various interconnects."

Maria-Victoria Fernandez-Serra, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Stony Brook University:

After modestly insisting that it is difficult to connect her research to the real world, Fernandez-Serra points to a decidedly concrete real-world application: extending the life and improving the efficiency of fuel cells, with the help of computer modeling. A critical hurdle to be surmounted, she says, is to design and synthesize the perfect electrode, "one that does not degrade and which is a very efficient catalyst for the chemical reaction that [a] fuel cell is designed to operate with."

"Computational experiments can shed light where experiments cannot give accurate enough information. What I'm proposing to do is not only modeling the quantum mechanical processes that are the source of the energy provided by fuel cells, but [also] do this on cells designed to work with hydrogen and oxygen as fuels," Fernandez-Serra says.

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