This grant supports awards for the second of three Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials (SM3) Scialog conferences, to be held in September 2025. The SM3 Scialog brings together top early-career faculty from diverse fields to develop collaborative research projects addressing critical challenges in material sustainability. At these conferences, scientists work together in small teams to craft research proposals that are then presented and reviewed, with the most promising ideas receiving seed funding. The first SM3 conference in 2024 was exceptionally successful. Participants generated a record of 36 research proposals, with seven selected for funding. The Sloan Foundation supported four of these projects focused on reducing resource-intensive mining processes, utilizing minerals from unconventional sources, and improving mineral separation techniques. This grant will support 10 awards to SM3 Scialog Fellows on winning proposals, with each Fellow receiving $66,000. While some projects may go on to secure additional funding in the future, the primary goal of this effort is building lasting networks among early-career researchers. A final SM3 conference is planned for 2026.

This grant supports the Colorado School of Mines' new Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty (NAMES) initiative, which addresses the issue of critical mineral development in close partnership and engagement with Tribal communities. This topic is particularly salient, as over 70% of domestic lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel reserves in the US are located on or within 35 miles of Tribal reservations. The NAMES initiative aims to bridge the gap between critical mineral mining expertise and Tribal sovereignty, acknowledging the complex history of resource extraction on Tribal lands. The grant will fund three key components, guided by an Advisory Council that will shape the initiative’s strategic direction. First, personnel support is provided for the NAMES Program Director position and a Program Administrator role for three years. Second, support is provided for the annual NAMES Symposium, which will be hosted on Tribal reservations and in close collaboration with Tribal leadership to ensure community participation. Finally, research outputs will be produced on the topics related to Indigenous communities and critical mineral development, including journal articles, policy papers, and opinion pieces. This support complements external funding provided to involve undergraduate and graduate students in the NAMES initiative.

The lack of regional and inter-regional transmission capacity to connect clean electricity generation sources to areas of high demand is a major challenge to the clean energy transition. Numerous studies have estimated that transmission capacity will need to increase dramatically to take full advantage of the growth of clean electricity sources that are planned to come online in the near future. However, building new transmission lines has proven to be politically and economically challenging. With this grant, researchers will study innovative approaches to increase electricity transmission capacity that go beyond building traditional new power lines. The team will explore two promising alternatives. The first is upgrading current power lines with advanced technologies to increase carrying capacity. The second is utilizing non-traditional rights-of-way—such as highways, rail corridors, and pipeline routes—to install high-voltage DC (HVDC) transmission lines, which can be more efficient for long-distance power transmission. The project consists of three phases: a comprehensive assessment of policy, economic and technological factors; in-depth analysis of specific interventions like HVDC installation; and creation of a multi-institution research consortium to advance this work. The team includes experts from multiple universities in behavioral science, public policy, energy modeling, and engineering, and industry practitioners from utilities and transmission operators will serve in advisory roles. The team plans to continue building out and expanding this interdisciplinary research network as it grows over time.

This grant provides support for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine's (NASEM) to implement a new Forum on Energy Systems Transformation and Decarbonization.  Unlike standard consensus committees, NASEM Forums offer the flexibility to respond quickly to emerging issues related to energy system decarbonization through workshops and other activities. The Forum will host annual public workshops, smaller closed meetings, and produce various outputs, all while providing networking and engagement opportunities for participants. Topics for Forum discussions may include issues like energy innovation, regional impacts of energy transformation, and the behavioral and economic dimensions of energy policies. In each of the next three years, the Forum will host at least one major public workshop and one smaller, closed meeting of Forum members. It will produce a summary workshop report following each public meeting, along with additional digital and print outputs as relevant. Beyond these tangible products, the Forum is designed to provide interactive engagement, networking, and community-building opportunities for the wide range of participants who join these events.

This grant renews support for the National Bureau of Economic Research's Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy (EEPE) initiative, an effort that connects researchers with policymakers on energy system decarbonization. The EEPE’s annual conference has become a cornerstone event for energy economists. This grant supports research paper generation and conference operations through 2028, when EEPE will reach its 10th anniversary. The program solicits policy-relevant research papers that might otherwise not be pursued, selecting six papers annually for presentation at the Washington, DC conference and then in subsequent publication by the University of Chicago Press. The conference attracts approximately 100 attendees, evenly split between policymakers from federal and state agencies and from academics. Early-career researchers value the opportunity to pursue policy-relevant questions, while government staff appreciate this rare, structured engagement with researchers. In this next cycle of funding, resources are provided to support graduate student researchers in attending this meeting. The grant will fund 24 original papers, four conferences, four published volumes, conference organization, and support for graduate student participation.

Identifying signs of life on another planet would rank among the top scientific discoveries in history. Two of the most daunting challenges to achieving such a discovery are developing instrumentation to study exoplanet atmospheres and developing a quantitative framework to assess whether life creates distinctive atmospheric biosignatures. Here, David Catling will address the latter challenge, aiming to develop a quantitative framework to identify atmospheric signatures of life on distant planets. While billions have been invested in telescopes capable of studying exoplanet atmospheres, we lack robust methods to interpret this data for signs of life.   The project focuses on assessing how living organisms impact a planet’s atmosphere. As such, the research team makes assumptions about life. Firstly, they assume Earth-familiar microbial life because Earth contains the only known examples of life, and because it’s thought that if life exists elsewhere in the universe, it’s more likely to be microbial rather than plant- or animal-based. Secondly, they assume redox-based metabolism would be universal to any life form because reduction / oxidation (redox) reactions are the only class of chemical reactions that release enough energy to satisfy the high energy demands of organisms. Rather than looking for individual gases that might indicate living systems, Catling proposes examining chemical disequilibrium—multiple gases coexisting that should normally react and eliminate each other—as a more reliable biosignature.   The research team will build an integrated model simulating planetary evolution from lifeless to hosting various biospheres. They'll quantify two potential biosignatures: free energy dissipation (which should increase dramatically with biological activity) and the information content of atmospheric disequilibrium. The final step involves determining which measurable gas abundances and fluxes most reliably indicate biological activity.

This grant will support Professor Zhiyue Lu to develop a theoretical framework to understand biochemical networks that operate far from equilibrium and outside steady states. Living systems exist in far-from-equilibrium states; this characteristic is one of the most striking distinctions between living and non-living systems.   Unlike non-living matter, living organisms demonstrate remarkable sensitivity and complex responses to environmental changes. While most scientific understanding focuses on near-equilibrium or steady-state systems, Lu aims to explore how biochemical networks respond to time-varying environmental conditions.   The research focuses on three key properties of living systems: sensitivity and robustness to environmental changes, ability to manipulate energy to power various processes, and capacity to extract energy from fluctuating environments. Through mathematical modeling and simulation, Lu's team will investigate how network structure influences these properties under different temporal patterns of environmental change. Specifically, they'll study how networks process complex information patterns, combine weak energy sources to power energy-intensive processes (or distribute energy from one source to multiple processes), and extract energy from environments that fluctuate at different timescales.

Scientists believe that before complex cellular life emerged on Earth, simpler “containers” may have served as early "protocells." Droplets containing various chemical systems are one candidate for such cell-like containers, but we currently have a poor understanding of whether such a protocell could have grown and divided—a fundamental requirement for life. Using a technique called electrochemistry, which applies electric current to drive chemical reactions, Professor Julio Alvarez will study how electrical charges affect the behavior of tiny droplets. When droplets become sufficiently charged, they can become unstable and split apart, potentially mimicking cellular division. The research team will use ultra-small electrodes to precisely control chemical reactions that modify droplet charge states. They'll examine various factors including different surfactants (molecules that stabilize droplets), solution environments, and conditions that mimic the crowded, viscous environment inside modern cells. By understanding what controls droplet growth and division, this research could illuminate a critical step in the transition from non-living chemistry to life on early Earth. The findings may also contribute to modern synthetic biology efforts to build artificial cells from scratch.

Discussions around the value of AI in science lack clarity about what ‘AI’ actually entails—from basic neural networks to advanced foundation models—and how these tools are applied in the scientific process. This project will systematically map the use of various AI approaches (machine learning, deep learning, foundation models) across scientific disciplines and research workflows. The team will begin by mining scientific literature for citations of key AI papers. Using large language models and natural language processing, they will assess the degree of AI engagement in citing papers—ranging from simple references for context, to active use in research methods, to modification of the AI models themselves. The study will also explore how adoption varies across disciplines based on model attributes such as size and openness. The focus will remain on AI’s role within the research process itself, rather than on administrative applications. Ultimately, the project will shed light on the evolving role of AI in science and bring greater precision to how we talk about AI’s place in scientific research.

Software Heritage (SWH) is an ambitious and pioneering initiative to archive all software source code ever written. Founded by Roberto Di Cosmo with Stefano Zacchiroli and hosted at INRIA in France, the project systematically collects code from software repositories worldwide. SWH now houses over 347 million software projects comprising nearly 24 billion source files. SWH has become integral to France's open science strategy, which explicitly acknowledges software as a key scientific output. Their tracking dashboard and curation tools provide transparency for software created through French research funding. This project will leverage existing SWH infrastructure to directly support the work of university-based Open Source Program Offices. Following a requirements survey, Di Cosmo has developed a plan to generalize the French dashboard, extend the CodeMeta data standard, and dedicate staff to implementation support. This grant will allow SWH, under the supervision of Morane Gruenpeter, to extend its infrastructure to directly benefit other Sloan grantees. The proposed tools address a critical need for scientific software supporters in universities and could significantly lower barriers to entry for new OSPOs, while also enhancing SWH's capabilities for AI model training.