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), with funding from the Department of Energy, 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 integrates 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.
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:
- Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), led by the University of Wisconsin at Madison
- Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) led by the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) led by the DOE’s Berkeley National Lab
To find out more about the BRC program:
DOE Booklet