Dozens of new US Department of Energy (DOE) centres are expected to recruit some 1,100 postdocs, graduate students and technical staff. The DOE announced on 27 April that it is creating 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, with the dual goals of training the next generation of researchers and fostering energy-related research.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Credit: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Each centre will receive between US$2 million and $5 million per year in federal funds for the next 5 years. “We hope the new centres will lead to growth of energy-related fields and that subsequent technological advances will be the seed corn to generate future green jobs,” says Harriet Kung, the DOE's associate director for basic energy sciences.

Sixteen centres will get their full 5 years of funding from $277 million allocated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the national economic stimulus package. The DOE has funded 30 other centres for their first year, and plans to fund the 4 subsequent years subject to budget constraints.

Of the 46 centres nationwide, 31 will be housed at universities, 12 at DOE national labs, two at nonprofit organizations and one at a private, commercial, research laboratory. The centres' specialities range from solar energy to catalysis to carbon storage.

The DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (pictured), for instance, will host two centres to concentrate on materials science. Each will address areas that sorely need revolutionary breakthroughs, says Michelle Buchanan, the lab's associate director for physical sciences. For example, a major bottleneck in developing new batteries or fuel cells is an incomplete understanding of how fluids interact with solid surfaces.

In March, Oak Ridge National Laboratory also received $71 million in stimulus funding to build a chemistry and materials-science lab for similar multidisciplinary research projects. Buchanan says the lab has begun recruiting at least a dozen researchers and up to two dozen students and postdocs.

Training will be the focus of Northwestern University's Center for Integrated Training in Far-From-Equilibrium and Adaptive Materials in Illinois. Centre director Bartosz Gryzbowski expects to provide hands-on training to 40–50 students and postdocs hired to help develop materials that adapt usefully to environmental stimuli. For example, one project aims to create materials that can turn light into mechanical energy. Gryzbowski says the energy-research funding has another benefit — it will draw interest back to mathematics and physics. “Solving the energy crisis captures the imagination,” he says.