Vision
 

To unite chemistry, engineering, and sustainability science in pursuit of designing the catalytic processes that will power a carbon-neutral world.

Mission Statement

The Catalysis Initiative for Clean Energy and Chemicals (CICLEC) at the University of Virginia (UVA) enables new interdisciplinary research in catalysis to create fundamental science and engineering advancements that facilitate energy-efficient catalytic processes to produce fuels and chemicals using carbon-neutral energy sources.

Why Catalysis, Why Now?

Every material object you interact with, fuels that power your car or heat your home, and nearly every medicine you take exists because of catalysis, which is the science of accelerating chemical reactions using materials that are themselves unchanged in the process. To this point, the vast majority of catalysts driving our economy have depended on fossil fuels as both their energy source and their raw material, locking the production of essential chemicals and fuels into a cycle that is warming our planet. The urgency of climate change has made breaking that cycle one of the defining scientific challenges of our time and catalysis is at the center of the solution. Advances in renewable electricity, materials science, and molecular design have converged to make this moment uniquely promising: we now have the tools to reimagine how the world's most important chemical processes work, powering them with sunlight and wind instead of coal and oil. But the gap between a promising laboratory result and a technology that operates reliably at industrial scale remains enormous, and closing it requires exactly the kind of deep, interdisciplinary collaboration that CICLEC facilitates. The discoveries made here at UVA today are the foundation on which a sustainable chemical economy will be built tomorrow.

Environmental Resilience and Sustainability

In June 2022, UVA announced a $60 million commitment to a collaborative approach to climate change. UVA researchers are pursuing two avenues focused on environmental resilience and sustainability: researching and perfecting clean energy, and helping local communities develop best practices for responding to climate change. This follows significant strategic investment in faculty hires and research infrastructure.

CICLEC is a signature project supported by the Grand Challenges Initiative. 

In March 2026, CICLEC was designated as a UVA Research Hub.