From the Pimentel Report to the present, blue-ribbon studies of future needs have emphasized the scientific and technological importance of catalysis, and the challenge of catalyst design. The design of any device requires understanding at a level appropriate to its function – in catalysis this is the molecular level. While surface science and computational chemistry have made important advances in creating molecular level understanding, “design” or “scale-up” from this knowledge base to produce new catalysts remains uncommon. Tomorrow’s lecture will focus on a successful example of catalyst design for the epoxidation of olefins. Today’s lecture will look at several cases drawn from catalysis by metal oxides to illustrate scale-up from fundamental studies to working catalysts. These have found additional motivation from contemporary issues such as the development of greener chemical processes. Finally, new challenges and fundamental research needs for catalysis in the chemicals and energy landscape of the future will be considered.