Sandia’s biological sciences personnel work at three sites: our R&D laboratory in Livermore, California; our corporate headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville, California. Sandians at each facility are equipped with state-of-the art research instruments and collaborate with experts and support personnel in a wide variety of technical and nontechnical fields.
Sandia partners with industry, universities, research institutions, and other national labs to build multidisciplinary teams for scientific breakthroughs. For example, Sandia has worked with companies such as Tenix, Waters, AM Biotechnologies, and InLight Solutions to develop marketable devices based on Sandia technologies. In the area of biodefense and emerging infectious diseases, we have partnered with infectious-disease experts at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, the University of New Mexico, and the University of California (UC) at San Francisco.
In the biofuels arena, Sandia joined Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore national labs, the UC campuses of Berkeley and Davis, and the Carnegie Institution for Science to form JBEI, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Center dedicated to advancing biofuels development. Sandia is leading JBEI’s effort to deconstruct lignocellulosic biomass into fermentable sugars, an essential step in JBEI’s drive to develop next-generation biofuels.
Sandia is also a founding member of the Algal Biofuels Consortium and was asked by the U.S. DOE to develop a National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap with partners at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In addition, Sandia researchers work with algae and microbial photosynthesis experts at Arizona State University and New Mexico State University.