Six institution-wide Major Initiatives exemplify PNNL’s efforts to integrate scientific discovery and technological innovation to address some of the nation’s most complex and pressing challenges. Each Major Initiative embodies a five- to ten-year commitment of resources to achieve significant, breakthrough progress in its focus area.

Reinventing Chemical Conversions and Energy Storage Materials addresses underlying and persistent hurdles to the reinvention of chemical processes that are faster, safer, and less expensive, advancing energy sustainability.

Understanding Multiscale Earth Dynamics and the Role of Coastal Systems seeks to increase the predictive power of Earth system models by observing, simulating, and analyzing the dynamic processes and interactions that take place within and across Earth systems, including atmospheric processes, coupled geological and biological processes, integrated human-Earth systems, and coastal systems.

Understanding, Predicting, and Controlling the Phenome draws on the extensive capabilities of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory to explore biosystem resiliency to environmental perturbations, discover molecular signatures that predict pathogenicity and disease, and engineer biological systems to produce valuable materials and chemicals.

Scalable Machine Reasoning for Scientific Discovery aims to realize machine reasoning capabilities and apply them to accelerate scientific discovery in domain areas including catalysis, Earth systems, cybersecurity, and predictive phenomics. Applications of machine reasoning will extend beyond discovery science to other PNNL signature research areas, such as power grid control, where PNNL has access to the most complete existing data sets.

Energy Decarbonization through Grid Control and Energy Storage combines the power of insights from large data sets with deep knowledge in PNNL’s foundational strengths in catalysis and chemical conversions, data sciences, and machine learning to modernize the nation’s electric power system and bolster system resilience.

Accelerating Development and Characterization of Nuclear Material Processing draws on a network of capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and weapons production facilities to strengthen the fundamental science foundations for nuclear materials processing modernization, stockpile stewardship, and development of next-generation nuclear energy technologies.