The Center activities are designed to address two Grand Challenges: synthesis - utilizing materials to make systems of arbitrary composition and designed structure, and far-from-equilibrium systems - the oldest and most pervasive ones in nature. Here the synthetic capabilities of Grzybowski, Mirkin, Stoddart, Stupp, Weiss, and Whitesides groups will employ both the "imagination" and the "control" ideas that animate the Grand Challenge document to create and investigate a broad range of systems. This work will be supported - and often guided- by the efforts of the theory core (Bishop, Glotzer, Grzybowski, Olvera, Ratner, Schatz, Szleifer) to construct accurate, predictive models of these physical systems, and, in particular, of their energetics and structures.

To understand self-organization in dissipative, far-from-equilibrium systems and to use this knowledge to synthesize adaptive, reconfigurable materials for energy storage and transduction.

Our overreaching goal is to combine the theory of such systems with cutting edge nanotechnology and/or self-assembly to synthesize, characterize and understand, in quantitative detail, fundamentally new classes of adaptive, reconfigurable materials that, while structurally robust, will have the ability to change and optimize their own performance (in energy processing, catalytic activity, etc.) in response to external/environmental stimuli.