The Joint BioEnergy Institute

Advancing the Next Generation of Biofuels

The Joint BioEnergy Institute, JBEI (pronounced jay-bay), is a scientific partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and including the Sandia National Laboratories, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science (located on the campus of Stanford University), and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

One of three Bioenergy Research Centers created in 2007 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), its five year mission – funded at $135 million – is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid transportation fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass.

JBEI is headquartered in a new state-of-the-art laboratory building in Emeryville, California, which is geographically close to all the JBEI partner institutes. JBEI has a staff of approximately 170, including scientists, post- doctoral and graduate student researchers, technicians and support personnel. It is led by Chief Executive Officer Jay Keasling, an award-winning senior scientist with Berkeley Lab and professor of chemical and bioengineering at UC Berkeley, and one of the leading authorities in the field of synthetic biology research. (www.jbei.org).