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Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have received a $1.2 million grant to develop computer simulations that could help manufacturing at the atomic and molecular level. The three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy was one of 17 given to universities and national laboratories to solve complex mathematical problems. Overall, the department gave $20 million across the country. Tinsley Oden, director of UT's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, will lead an inter-disciplinary team of chemists, engineers, biochemists and researchers. "This is relatively unexplored territory," Oden says. "Modeling events that take place over those many scales is probably the hottest topic in computational mathematics at present."