Paul Werbos

Donald R. Sadoway

W. Nicholas Delgass

At a recent IEEE workshop for Congressional staff on plug-in hybrid cars, the questions were posed: “What is the probability that basic researchers in the US could come up with a new battery twice as good for cars as the newly emerging standard, the iron phosphate lithium ion battery? What could be done to maximize the probability that this goal is actually achieved, as soon as possible?” This workshop will attempt to answer the second question, with reference to what NSF can do. It will particularly ask what can be done to take full advantage of approaches to creating breakthroughs used in the pharmaceutical industry, where computer simulation based on computational intelligence and quantum mechanical modeling  has made it possible to search a larger space of possibilities more quickly and more cheaply than conventional approaches.