Paper MS-TuA10
Using EMSL Capabilities in Combination with those from other User Facilities to Address Fundamental and Applied Problems

Tuesday, November 8, 2016, 5:20 pm, Room 103A

Increasingly a wide range of advanced research tools and expertise are needed to address important scientific and societal questions. The Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, EMSL, is one of several US Department of Energy user facilities provided to facilitate cutting-edge research. This talk will highlight the focus of EMSL, recent efforts to integrate activities at multiple user facilities and efforts being made to increase industrial use of user facilities. The vision of EMSL is to pioneer discoveries and mobilize the scientific community to provide the molecular science foundations that will address research priorities of the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and our nation’s critical biological, environmental and energy challenges. To accomplish these aims, EMSL science is focused in four areas: biosystem dynamics and design, atmospheric aerosol systems, terrestrial and subsurface ecosystems and molecular transformation. Molecular transformations that occur at surfaces and interfaces are critical in each of these areas, and EMSL provides a wide range of unique and state-of-the-art spectroscopy, microscopy, magnetic resonance and computational capabilities to advance science on these topics (www.emsl.pnnl.gov). Similar to all DOE user facilities, researchers typically use resources at EMSL for little to no cost if results are shared in the open literature, and access is provided by a proposal and peer review process. As a multi-disciplinary facility, we encourage proposals that combine instrumentation across our capability groups to advance scientific understanding. Increasingly, we are focusing on real-time in situ measurements in a variety of environments. Efforts over the last few years to enable cross facility access through a single proposal to examine novel ways for scientific user facilities to work together has resulted in the FICUS program—Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science. With the opportunity to pursue one research project at two or more institutions under FICUS, scientists can leverage disparate resources, shave years off their project times and amplify the impact of their work. Additional efforts are underway to address access policies and training reciprocity that will further streamline the user’s experience and increase industrial use of these facilities as well.