Rapid developments of nanoscience have now enabled unprecedented opportunities to synthesize and fabricate nanostructured materials at high precision. It had been demonstrated that the capacity of fashioning well-defined, high-quality semiconducting nanomaterials is critical to next-generation novel energy technologies. Therefore, a major focus of this program is to discover new synthetic methods that yield semiconductor nanostructures with defects that are either effectively negligible or are prepared with a level of precision that enables their consequences to be rigorously characterized, modeled, and manipulated. This program emphasizes deep integration of atomistic-level theoretical modeling and experimental characterization of dynamical properties to understand the microscopic origins of optical, electronic, and chemical processes in semiconductor nanostructures at their fundamental physical limits.