Moving your rook along a straight path across the chess board is a simple action, but these moves add up to an amazing variety that makes the game continually challenging. In innovative energy science, the challenge is understanding and then leveraging these simple, single actions to create remarkable materials and processes to solve national challenges. In this issue, we examine the challenge and our successes in creating outstanding matter in Engineering Emergent Behavior to Tackle the Third Grand Challenge.

Meeting this challenge, of course, requires a depth of scientific knowledge in a single field and the ability to reach out to others to  collaborate, as is highlighted in our article on the new DOE Energy Storage Hub and its relation to the EFRCs. Further, meeting this challenge requires focus and physical stamina, as you'll learn about our feature article on Peter Green, Director of the Center for Solar and Thermal Energy Conversion.

To give you a glimpse of the science being done across the centers, read our highlights. For example, you'll learn how scientists are creating materials that capture the wasted light from your monitor and channel it into energy. You'll also see how an elegant technique led to a material capable of sifting out other molecules to get bio-molecules of just the right size, and you'll see how scientists are solving the problems necessary to turn simple materials into fuels, faster than Mother Nature can.

In all of these articles, you'll see how asking "why?" and other simple actions have remarkable results.

Kristin Manke, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Board

• Khuram Ashraf, Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center
• Dennis Callahan, Light-Materials Interactions in Energy Conversion
• Enoch Dames, Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center
• Brian Doyle, Heterogeneous Functional Materials Center
• Tyler Josephson, Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation
• Gyu Leem, Center for Solar Fuels
• Kara Manke, Center for Solid State Solar Thermal Energy Conversion
• Brandon O'Neill, Institute of Atom Efficient Chemical Transformations
• Ioannis (Yannis) Petousis, Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion
• Jaroslaw Syzdek, Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage
• Lynn Trahey, Center for Electrical Energy Storage
• Adam Wise, Polymer-Based Materials for Harvesting Solar Energy

Guest Authors

• Ralph House, Center for Solar Fuels
• Paul Giokas, Center for Solar Fuels

Special Friends of the Editor

• Lawrence Friedman, Polymer-Based Materials for Harvesting Solar Energy
• Paul Lahti, Polymer-Based Materials for Harvesting Solar Energy