JBEI Awarded $125 million for biofuels research

June 2007 Berkeley and the Bay Area cemented their position as the nation's center of alternative energy research with the announcement today by the Department of Energy of a $125 million, five-year grant to Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), headed by Bioengineering Professor Jay Keasling. The California center, to be known as the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), involves six partners: LBNL, Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the UC campuses of Berkeley and Davis, and Stanford University. "The selection of JBEI is a major vote of confidence in the Bay Area's growing leadership in the national effort to develop new and cleaner sources of renewable energy," said Jay Keasling, UC Berkeley professor of chemical engineering and JBEI's chief executive officer. Keasling also is director of LBNL's Physical Biosciences Division. Read more at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/06/26_jbei.shtml