News

On May 5th, the University of California Board of Regents approved Katherine Yelick as the next director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Her appointment as director begins on July 1st.Yelick is a leading computer scientist with a highly distinguished research and leadership career at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. She is currently the Vice Chancellor for Research and the... Read more

Three projects led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are among those selected as part of a $155 million Department of Energy (DOE) investment in American industrial innovation. Spanning load flexibility, data center cooling, and food processing, the projects capitalize on the Lab’s expertise in developing and testing leading-edge technologies to boost American productivity... Read more

Paul Berdahl, a retired staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), passed away February 5, 2026 in Walnut Creek, California. He was 80 years old. Berdahl spent most of his career at LBNL, including working with the Heat Island Group for 30 years on cool roofing technology to reduce air-conditioning energy use. Berdahl was part of the LBNL-led team that won an R&D 100 Award in... Read more

At the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), researchers are investigating and installing digital twins of highly sophisticated instruments that have the potential to dramatically speed up scientific discoveries.A digital twin is a dynamic, virtual replica of a complex physical system such as a battery, manufacturing component, or a car. Digital twins have... Read more

Developing the lithium-ion battery took decades of research. A new multi-institutional project led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) aims to cut that timeline dramatically, using AI and supercomputers to speed the discovery of materials for batteries, semiconductors, and other energy technologies.The project — called FORUM-AI (Foundation Models... Read more

In 2011, a small team at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) launched what would become the world’s most-cited materials database. Today, the Materials Project serves over 650,000 users and has been cited more than 32,000 times — but its real impact may just be emerging.When renowned computational materials scientist Kristin Persson and her team... Read more

Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and an affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in the development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and the techniques for designing and synthesizing new MOF structures – a field termed “reticular chemistry.”Developed in the... Read more

Today’s technologies depend increasingly on computers and artificial intelligence — largely powered by data centers, which have become essential U.S. infrastructure. Over the past two decades, data centers have proliferated quickly, driving up demand for electricity to power high-performance computing chips, as well as water and energy for cooling.Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... Read more

This year’s Director’s Awards at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) recognized several members of Energy Technologies Area (ETA) staff. The research teams leading data center analysis and energy management and information system (EMIS) research were recognized for societal impact, the Cradle to Commerce program and the Modelica open-source library were... Read more

Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and former director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), shared the 2025 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his pioneering work in reticular chemistry, including the invention of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs). Currently an affiliate at the... Read more

Samuel Morris Berman, a pioneering physicist whose work transformed the science of lighting and energy efficiency, died on September 6, 2025, in Albany, California. He was 92. Berman joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1977 as a senior scientist and the founding head of its Lighting Group. Under his leadership, the group advanced understanding of how lighting affects human... Read more

A new kind of thin-glass triple-pane window could save U.S. businesses and homeowners billions of dollars annually in energy costs, as well as enable U.S. manufacturing, shorter wait times for builders, and more choices for consumers.Two U.S. window makers are paving the way for this burgeoning market. Since 2021, Renewal by Andersen, based in Minnesota, has been mass-manufacturing windows with... Read more

A new technique uses ultrafast lasers to transform ordinary metal surfaces into “super black” materials that nearly double the electricity output of heat-to-energy thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems. In the journal Joule, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) described their novel method of creating “Laser-Blackened Surfaces” (LaBS) by using... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Research Scientist Bin Wang and Retired Staff Scientist Joe Eto were recognized for outstanding publications by the world’s largest technical professional organization, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and its Power & Energy Society (IEEE PES). Eto and Wang received 2025 PES Prize Paper Awards for their roles in co-authoring... Read more

Wanshi Hong, research scientist in the Energy Analysis & Environmental Impacts Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was honored in June as a co-recipient of a Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office team award. Hong is a member of a multidisciplinary team working to advance Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA) technology, which enables vehicles to communicate and... Read more

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are partnering with electric utilities across the country to create more accurate cost estimates for both short- and long-term power outages, building tools to guide investments in grid reliability.Recent highlights of the work include an update to Berkeley Lab’s Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator, a public website that... Read more

A research team led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) designed and fabricated catalysts that can increase the speed of carbon monoxide oxidation by nine times. Carbon monoxide oxidation is an important reaction used in numerous chemical industry and environmental cleaning applications. The cutting-edge fabrication approach involved making... Read more

A team of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have laid the foundations in a study published in Energy & Environmental Science for safer, more energy-dense solid-state battery designs by identifying a class of glassy polymers with high ion-conductivity at room temperature. Led by senior scientist and leader of the Applied Energy Materials Group Gao Liu, the LBNL... Read more

Today, Open Molecules 2025, an unprecedented dataset of molecular simulations, was released to the scientific community, paving the way for development of machine learning tools that can accurately model chemical reactions of real-world complexity for the first time.This vast resource, produced by a collaboration co-led by Meta and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... Read more

Michigan State University (MSU) honored Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) battery design expert Gao Liu with an Alumni Award in its 45th annual ceremony, celebrating excellence among faculty, alumni, and students.Liu, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the university in 2001, is now senior scientist and leader of the Applied Energy Materials Group at LBNL. For more than 20 years, he... Read more

What if advanced clothing or accessories could cool people down fast, no matter where they are? Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have demonstrated a new material design that could make this possible with minimal electricity.The technology involves thin, shape-shifting film layers... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) researcher Hanna Breunig shared her personal career reflections in a recent ACS Energy Letters series focused on energy science field leaders who published seminal work in 2024. Breunig recalled a lecture delivered by the engineer and water systems expert James Bisogni at Cornell University when she was an undergraduate student, which helped her... Read more

Scientist-entrepreneur Mike Tucker was named 2024 Inventor of the Year for the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). At a January 22 Innovation Celebration event, the Lab’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) recognized Tucker as his research Area’s most prolific innovator by volume of IPO technology submissions. Tucker is an electrochemical engineer... Read more

Joe Rand, an energy policy researcher in the Energy Markets and Policy Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), was named in the Top 50 Data Changemakers in the Energy Sector 2025. The list was recently published by Chief Data Officer Magazine. The magazine included Rand in “an elite group of innovators who are at the forefront of an industry undergoing seismic... Read more

Adam Weber, senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and Marca Doeff, retired senior scientist from LBNL, were honored as inaugural recipients of the Electrochemical Society's San Francisco Section Awards.The San Francisco Section Award was established in 2021 to recognize excellence in the field of electrochemical science and technology and/or solid-state science and... Read more