Michael Pravica (Physics and Astronomy) recently received a 2015 Stewardship Science Academic Alliances award through the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. The three-year, $780,000 grant is to develop a novel field of science Pravica has been developing, called "useful hard X-ray photochemistry." He takes advantage of the highly focused, highly penetrating, and highly ionizing properties of hard X-rays (>7keV) to initiate novel decomposition and synthetic chemistry under isolated or extreme conditions.