CABBI’s Mission

One of the major challenges the world faces is how to provide sustainable sources of energy that meet societal needs as the population continues to grow. The Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) will develop efficient ways to grow bioenergy crops, transform biomass into valuable chemicals, and market the resulting biofuels and other bioproducts.

CABBI’s Vision

CABBI will integrate recent advances in agronomics, genomics, and synthetic and computational biology to increase the value of energy crops — using a “plants as factories” approach to grow fuels and chemicals in plant stems, an automated foundry to convert biomass into valuable chemicals, and ensuring that its products are ecologically and economically sustainable. This holistic approach will help reduce our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels, thus increasing national security.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

It is important that the CABBI community reflects the diversity of the society we seek to serve. Just as the expertise of many disciplines is required to accomplish our goals, the viewpoints of people with a diversity of race, gender identity, religion, and life experience is required to ensure that the research questions we choose to ask and the research that we choose to do, along with new technologies and approaches we develop, increase the equity in our country and the world. To this end, CABBI will continue to look for opportunities to join with related efforts and initiatives at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and our partner institutions, such as the Committee on Diversity Task Force within the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the Academic Women in STEM.

CABBI Brochures & Related Publications

CABBI Directory 2023, a personnel listing as of June 5, 2023

CABBI Phase I Highlights, a one-pager of 2017-22 accomplishments

CABBI in Brief 2023, a two-page read on the basics of the Center

CABBI 2022, a four-page brochure on the Center after four years of operations

Filling the Gaps and Defining the Future of Bioenergy, CABBI overview published January 2018

More about the Bioenergy Research Centers …

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Energy approved CABBI as the fourth Bioenergy Research Center (BRCs) in the nation. All four BRCs were renewed in 2022 and will receive up to $30 million a year for FY 2023-27. The others:

To find out more about the BRC program, view the DOE Booklet >>>