UT professors’ teams to explore crucial questions about energy

Mark Lisheron
Austin American Statesman

Two teams of scientists from the University of Texas have been asked by the U.S. Department of Energy to set out on the energy frontier — one team in search of a new way to collect solar energy, the other to contend with the byproducts of America’s energy use.

Professors Paul Barbara and Gary Pope have been given $30.5 million in grants as part of a $777 million national energy research effort that its developers have likened to the creation of the atomic bomb and the mission to put a man on the moon. Their projects were two of 46 that the Energy Department’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences chose from among 260 proposals.

These energy frontier research centers, as the Energy Department calls them, have been charged with providing the research foundation for a multibillion-dollar government drive to answer some of the biggest questions of national energy use and its consequences.