The research priorities of the Vagelos Institute ensure that the Institute meets its goals to facilitate effective and cross-disciplinary collaborations among Penn faculty in SAS and SEAS and to play a leadership role in helping Penn faculty secure new, externally-funded, energy-focused, large collaborative research grants. The research priorities of the Institute will continue to evolve through the consistent exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas that the Institute seeks to foster. The current research priorities include:

• Critical Materials and Domestic Supply Chains: topics include low-energy separations, recovery, recycling, mineral processing, etc.
• Foundational Chemistry and Materials for Strategic Energy Technologies: topics include the design and characterization of new molecules, catalysts, chemical systems, or materials for applications such as long-term energy storage or carbon capture/storage; energy technologies based on earth-abundant elements, etc.
• Manufacturing Science to Transform the Chemistry Industry: topics include alternative feedstocks, electrified or photolytic chemical production, decentralizing chemical production, AI-enabled process optimization, etc.
• AI-Enabled Energy Science: topics include AI-guided materials discovery; AI-assisted literature, synthesis, or experiment-planning workflows; lab automation; development of curated datasets or standardized templates for experimental data; capture of negative results and experimental metadata; etc.