In the leadup to the second World War, scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison contributed to research on high-test aviation fuel as well as efforts to build the first atomic bomb. 

In a sense, the University of Wisconsin–Madison was built for energy research.

From finding the natural resources needed to enable industrialization to producing and storing clean electricity, society’s need for energy has both driven and been shaped by 175 years of research at the University of Wisconsin‒Madison.

If successful at an industrial scale, the technology could help replace toxic petrochemicals such as BPA while also generating new revenue streams to make cellulosic biofuel as cheap as fossil fuels. 

Wisconsin Energy Institute affiliate Vatsan Raman, associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry, is among thirteen faculty to be honored with the H.I.

Lignocellulosic biomass, the woody parts of plants, is made of two types of sugars bound together by lignin. Lignin contains ring-shaped compounds known as aromatics that can be a source of valuable products traditionally derived from fossil fuels, but it's hard to pull these individual chemicals out of the mix. Some bacteria can convert plant-based aromatics into chemicals used to make plastics, but there are challenges to getting high yields.

Dubbed a self-driving laboratory, the system uses a computer algorithm to identify the relationship between protein sequence and function and suggest changes likely to improve certain functions. The computer then sends the protein sequences to a robotic lab that tests them and provides feedback from experimental data to help the agent improve its “understanding” of the system and guide future rounds of experiments.