Goal 5

Goals

Goal 5 Impacts and Partnerships

Create scientific impacts for the solar fuels community, and more broadly in the chemistry and materials science community.

The State of the Art in 2025

Fuel production draws on electrochemistry, catalysis, materials chemistry, semiconductor physics, and chemical engineering. The expertise and specialized instruments needed to resolve its basic scientific questions are distributed across institutions. Comparing results also requires well-characterized samples, reliable data, and consistent methods. Research partnerships and shared capabilities are therefore essential to testing new models and extending discoveries beyond individual laboratories. Training must prepare researchers to connect molecular mechanisms with materials and system behavior.

LiSA’s Research

LiSA builds partnerships with universities, national laboratories, other Department of Energy research Hubs, user facilities, and industry. We identify complementary expertise and scientific questions that connect directly to Goals 1 through 4. Joint projects bring outside capabilities into the research program and allow other groups to test and extend LiSA’s findings. Industrial engagement helps define operating requirements that can guide fundamental investigations.

We develop and share modeling methods, research datasets, and experimental platforms through publications, repositories, workshops, and collaborations. Resources such as the photoelectrode foundry and methods for probing operating interfaces will support directly comparable studies across laboratories. Researcher exchanges are being developed to give external graduate students and postdoctoral scientists opportunities to work with LiSA investigators and specialized facilities.

Training connects fundamental electrochemistry, for example through the LiSA 101 series, with hands-on experimental and computational research. Workshops, seminars, and exchanges help researchers learn complementary methods and apply them to shared scientific problems. Working across disciplines and institutions develops the expertise needed to design, measure, and model fuel-producing materials and systems. LiSA tracks collaborations, joint publications, use of shared capabilities, and participation in training to assess how the program advances the broader research community.