National Lab Day at The University of Toledo 2019

National Lab 101, Panel #1
Supporting the Nation’s Scientific Ecosystem - A roundtable discussion about the national laboratories’ user facilities, educational opportunities, and core research programs.

National Lab 101, Panel #2
Moving Solutions to Society - A roundtable discussion about how the national laboratories work with universities, industry, and governments to move technology to society.

The Land-Water Interface: The Great Lakes Region and the World
This session explores complex environmental challenges facing the Great Lakes region and that exist increasingly throughout the world. Special attention is on the challenge of harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie and factors that contribute to this problem, including the impact of a changing climate, nutrient loading into waterways, and human activities. The importance of understanding the terrestrial-aquatic interface is emphasized. The session explores how a better understanding of the relationship among climatic conditions and ecological variables provides guidance in addressing problems as well as preparing for biomes in transition. The session considers how such changes challenge land use practices in rural and metropolitan areas.

High Performance Computing Addressing Critical Issues for Northwest Ohio
The DOE national laboratories’ suite of HPC assets and deep bench of computing experts and computational infrastructure are available for researchers throughout the country. This session will explore and provide examples of how DOE’s computing and computational resources can be applied to issues critical to Ohio universities and Northwest Ohio. These include development of next generation photovoltaics, gaining a better understanding of watershed dynamics and forecasting, and addressing major health issues.

Sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment
This session explores how emerging science, tools and technologies can be used to create more sustainable products that promote resilient human and natural systems. Examples of emerging decision-making tools include network analysis, advances in life cycle assessment, and other integrated modeling approaches that fully consider human and natural systems to address short- and long-term disturbances, feedback loops, and even planetary thresholds (absolute sustainability). We will explore how these tools can be used to evaluate the role of new technologies in creating sustainable and resilient systems, with special emphasis on circular economy approaches for solar PV panels and plastics.

Structural Biology, Imaging and Spectroscopy
This session profiles high-resolution imaging techniques in biological systems over multiple length scales. Techniques can provide temporal information for targets of interest in medicine and microbial ecology. Foci are protein - receptor interactions, cell structure and biological response to the physical and chemical environment. Techniques include cryo-EM, high resolution X-ray crystallography, IR spectromicroscopy using synchrotron radiation, and high-field NMR.

Astrophysics
Our understanding of origins, evolution, and structure in the Universe — from the widest cosmic scales, to galactic ecosystems, to the formation of individual stars — is poised for a great leap forward in the next several decades. The coming wave of advanced ground- and space-based observational facilities, large scale spectroscopic and time-domain surveys, advanced data exploration methodologies, and powerful new computational frameworks will greatly extend our reach, helping us answer fundamental questions about the Universe. This session will focus on simulations of the first stars and black holes in the early Universe, the impact of accreting black holes on the evolution of galaxies, and the formation, evolution and role of stellar clusters as the basic units of star formation.

Exposure Science – ‘Omics’ Applications for Human Health
Humans are exposed to, or intake, food, water, air, and other environmental agents on a daily basis. At the same time, humans release non-natural substances to the environment, including personal care products, and prescription and illicit drugs. The combination of these exposures can exert profound effects on human and environmental health. This session explores the contact of humans or other organisms with chemical, physical, and biologic stressors and their fate in living systems. Through exposure science and modern toxicology, we will explore how advanced ‘Omics’ approaches can help us understand stressors that affect human and ecosystem health and interface with sensor systems, analytical methods, molecular biology, computational tools, and bioinformatics.

Materials and Manufacturing
This session explores a variety of approaches for the development of advanced materials and manufacturing technologies. Special focus is on the progress of additive manufacturing techniques, which are used to “print” a wide spectrum of functional components; design and synthesis of heterogeneous catalysts for accelerated chemical reactions; and fabrication of membranes for effective separations and fuel cell technologies. Topics include modeling and simulation, synthesis and fabrication, and ex-situ and in-situ characterization techniques for structure-property correlations to applications.

Photovoltaics
In 2011, the DOE announced the SunShot program with the goal of making solar electricity price-competitive with conventional utility sources by 2020. The combined effort from national labs, universities, and industry allowed the goal for utility-scale photovoltaics to be reached three years early. As a result, a new goal has been established: to reduce the cost of solar by an additional 40% to 70% beyond 2018 costs by 2030. This session will explore the development of avenues that have the potential to reach this goal, with a focus on device and module efficiency, manufacturing, and reliability.

Microbial Ecology
There is a critical need to understand the function and role of microbial communities and how they control biogeochemical responses to a wide variety of changes in environmental conditions. This understanding is necessary for everything from predicting ecosystem responses to warming to achieving environmental contaminant remediation. The session goal is to explore methodologies and tools to improve our predictive understanding of the roles of microbial communities in mediating carbon and nutrient fluxes, contaminant remediation and other critical biogeochemical processes, as well as using microbial systems as sentinels of environmental threats and perturbations. This includes integrated lab and field experiments, coupled with a sophisticated suite of biochemical and chemical analyses, to determine the molecular mechanisms governing microbial decomposition, biogeochemical cycling and synthesis into microbial-explicit models.

Molecular Structure & Dynamics
Molecular structure and interactions underlie the properties and performance of natural and engineered systems, including living organisms, chemical technologies, and advanced materials. This session focuses on characterizing how the chemical structure affects intermolecular interactions in solution, colloidal and interfacial, and biological processes. These include biomolecular binding, small molecule and polymer self-assembly, phase transitions (e.g., condensation, evaporation and crystallization/precipitation), and multiphase processing.

Energy Storage & Distribution
Energy storage and distribution are critically important components for the future of transportation and the electric grid. Developing low-cost, reliable, energy-dense and safe energy storage and grid solutions for the future requires catalyzing breakthroughs in materials science, interfacial reactions and transport processes, and advances in manufacturing methodologies. This session will explore how advanced experimental and theoretical capabilities can accelerate materials discovery and the control over transport and reactions at many length-scale to enable the design and scale-up of the next-generation of energy storage and grid solutions.