With the support of the Macromolecular, Supramolecular and Nanochemistry Program in the Division of Chemistry, Profs. Simon M. Humphrey and Graeme Henkelman at the University of Texas at Austin are leading a collaborative research program involving the synthesis, catalytic and computational studies of new nanoparticle-based catalyst materials. The targeted catalysts are based on unstudied (and, in some cases, previously inaccessible) compositions of metallic elements, such that cooperative properties provide access to catalysts with new types of reactivity, and advanced chemical selectivity. Metal-based catalysts are widely utilized in large-scale conversions of simple chemical feedstocks to provide value-added products that are crucial to produce drugs, polymers, textiles, detergents, and many other materials required by modern society. Catalysts also reduce the production of waste by-products, which is environmentally important. This project will specifically aim to discover and study new catalyst materials that contain combinations of three or four different metallic species, whose specific catalyst compositions that have been predicted by computational chemistry to be capable of achieving advanced reactivity in the conversion of (a) bioethanol into hydrogen, and (b) to use the generated hydrogen in reaction with carbon dioxide to produce methanol. Bioethanol is an increasingly widely available liquid fuel, produced in the USA by natural (biological) fermentation of waste