The US faces significant challenges to alleviate its growing demand for petroleum and petroleum-derived products.  It is now well-recognized that world-wide production of petroleum will peak in this century, most likely within the next 10-25 years.  Moreover, the scientific consensus is that use of fossil fuels over the past century has significantly increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which may accelerate global climate change. One strategy that has the potential of diminishing our reliance on oil while decreasing the environmental impact of fossil fuel processing involves the creation of integrated biorefineries that produce both fuels and chemicals.  A major challenge is to efficiently convert alternative biorenewable feedstocks to useful materials.  A biorefinery will likely use a combination of biocatalysis for raw material conversion to various building blocks followed by heterogeneous catalysis for secondary transformation of those building blocks to high value fuels and chemicals.  Experimental studies on the catalytic conversion of biorenewable molecules to useful products are major components of our research group.