Research Frontiers and Capability Gaps for Controlling and Designing Functional Materials; January 20-22, 2009, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos Research Park [LA-UR-09-07-07595]

ii, 33, [1] pages. Color illustration. Footnotes. Dr. McCleskey is associated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Chemistry Division. The Chemistry Division is composed of the division office and five technical groups. Each group name gives an indication of the types of activities being pursued within the group. Including technical staff members, technicians, support personnel, students, and postdoctoral researchers, there are approximately 450 people in the division. Many of the research and development projects in the division span several groups and divisions, and a number of them involve partnerships with academia, industry, or both. Its annual budget of approximately $95 million comes from a diverse set of program offices within the Laboratory. These offices focus on nuclear weapons, threat reduction, homeland security, science, applied energy, and environment. They serve as the interfaces with program elements of the Department of Energy and other federal agencies, such as the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and more. Postdoctoral and student employees account for roughly 20% of our workforce and join us from colleges and universities around the country and the world. They bring new ideas and techniques from their most recent appointments and contribute to our division's vitality and development. Over the years, many of our postdoctoral fellows have joined the Laboratory as technical staff members. Most advances in materials have focused on an observation approach that involves detailed characterization of a new material followed by integration of the material into applications based on the material properties. These properties are further tuned by changes in the processing conditions via a trial and error effort. The notion of predicting the properties of a material and systematically controlling the composition, defects and interfaces is typically viewed as something far off in the future. One exception that stands out is in the computer industry where the systematic characterization, and controlled manipulation of both purity and interfaces at ever increasingly finer resolution has lead to material advances and performance capabilities that not long ago would have been viewed by most people as impossible.…