Maria Chan from NST presented this talk at Argonne Out Loud. “People eagerly anticipate environmental benefits from advances in clean energy technologies, such as advanced batteries for electric cars and thin-film solar cells. Optimizing these technologies for peak performance requires an atomic-level understanding of the designer materials used to make them. But how is that achieved? Maria Chan will explain how computer modeling is used to investigate and even predict how materials behave and change, and how researchers use this information to help improve the materials’ performance. She will also discuss the open questions, challenges, and future strategies for using computation to advance energy materials.”