The grant provides two years of support to Deep Energy (DE) community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Representing 176 researchers in 32 nations, the group is about half from the United States and half from the rest of the world, the Deep Energy Community is the branch of the DCO that examines the abundance, distribution, and origins of deep Earth abiotic hydrocarbons and the reactions between energy and rock that produce energy. Grant funds will provide research support to the community as it completes a set of eight initiatives on reduced carbon formation, the fate of reduced carbon, confined hydrogen behavior, isotopic bond ordering of methane, ocean floor serpentinization, Precambrian cratons, analysis of sediment cores taken from a drilling site in Oman, and monitoring of subsurface microbial activity rates. The last project, joint with the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Deep Life community, aims to determine how rapidly changes in subsurface metabolic activity occur in response to seismic events. (In plain words, earthquakes might cause deep microbial blooms.) Along with completing these studies, the DE community would carry out a range of activities to synthesize and integrate the component activities, including through the DCO’s collective effort to create a system of models of deep Earth carbon.

This grant to professor Rob Knight and Pieter Dorrenstein at the University of California San Diego funds efforts to develop and disseminate techniques for 3D mapping of the microbiology and metabolism of built environments. Knight and Dorrenstein will use commodity scanning and motion capture systems to build 3D models of built environments, track microbial movement through a room, and identify hundreds of swab locations in 3D space automatically. They also plan to upgrade QIITA (https://qiita.ucsd.edu/), the open source microbial study management platform, to include “living data” concepts from the Global Natural products Social Network (GNPS), allowing re-annotation of MoBE datasets and connection of 3D maps with microbes and molecules from thousands of other studies. They will also produce scans of at least eight visually and scientifically compelling built environments. To reach these objectives, the University of California, San Diego, team plans to develop and disseminate improved integrated software tools. They will produce a pipeline and kit for collecting datasets and producing 3D maps, which will then be tested by MoBE community members. They expect to create a set of visually and technically compelling maps of built environmental spaces in 3D, with sequence and metabolite information. They plan to share the information online through websites, blogs, and conference presentations. They plan to train at least 30 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty and/or research staff through two workshops. Knight and Dorrenstein will share their research and findings through peer-reviewed publications. The expected outcome of this proposal is new, high-quality 3D maps of built environments that help future funders and stakeholders better visualize and understand the microbiology of the built environment.

This grant provides two years of operational support for the operation and enhancement of microbe.net, a website that provides services to the diverse community of researchers working at the intersection of microbiology and the built environment. Over the next two years, a team led by Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis, plan to sustain the role of microBEnet as a critical hub for the field; develop and disseminate education, training, and outreach materials that will help sustain the MoBE field; build partnerships around key reference data sets in order to attract new methods, investigators, and collaborations in the field; develop synergistic interactions with other MoBE projects; and move microBEnet toward independent, long-term sustainability. The work plan includes further expansion of the network of site contributors and users. Eisen also plans to develop MoBE course materials; collect and post MoBE research protocols, conference reports, and unpublished white papers; support the addition of a MoBE component to existing Citizen Science projects; and encourage community members to curate Wikipedia pages on MoBE topics. In addition, Eisen plans to continue sequencing efforts to leverage reference datasets (genomes, metagenomics, and 16S rRNA surveys) to draw in new people to the field.

This grant funds work by economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, who are investigating the economics of robotics and automation. These two researchers have begun developing a conceptual framework to understand how robotics is affecting the economy. The effects of new automation technologies, they maintain, can best be understood by explicitly examining how fast and how thoroughly they replace human labor in the performance of specific tasks. One virtue of such a framework is that it helps distinguish between the “displacement effect” of automation—the way it can reduce demand for certain kinds of labor—and the “productivity effect” of automation—the way it can increase the value of certain sorts of labor by making laborers more productive. Using this framework, Acemoglu and Restrepo estimate that an increase of one new robot per thousand workers in the U.S. economy reduces the ratio of employment to population by 0.5 percentage points and reduces average wages by 1 percent in a local labor market with the average U.S. exposure to robots relative to a local labor market with no exposure to robots. Grant funds will support the extension and refinement of Acemoglu and Restrepo’s work, including plans to disaggregate effects across various labor markets by studying long-term and fine-grain data at the firm level. The project promises to generate at least six academic papers based on this work.