Imagine assembling a few thousand marbles into a machine capable of transforming the energy of an electric field into mechanical torque at nearly 100% efficiency and lasting ten million cycles. Although marbles are not atoms, Nature has done exactly that, assembling carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen atoms into remarkable nanomachines. And while Nature took billions of years to transform primordial dirt into the molecular motors that power living cells, the atoms comprising present-day biomachines are no different from those found in common inorganic compounds, and they obey the same laws of physics that enable the machines's amazing properties. Understanding how the remarkable functionality of biological nanomachines comes about from the spatial arrangement of their atoms and using this knowledge to design synthetic systems that exceed in the performance of their biological counterparts is the focus of this group's research program.