The core of the Sloan Energy and Environment program is to advance our understanding of how best to transition U.S. energy systems from fossil fuel power generation to alternative sources that produce net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide. Beyond understanding alternative routes toward decarbonization—zero-carbon energy sources, improved transmission infrastructure, and reduced energy use—we also need to understand how the costs and benefits of each of these pathways will be distributed across different populations, especially those that have been historically marginalized or underrepresented, such as Black, Hispanic, or Native American communities. This grant supports the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in launching a study focusing on how to accelerate the transition to low carbon energy systems across the United States. Drawing on a committee of 20-30 independent researchers with broad expertise across multiple facets of the energy system, the study will explore how the U.S. can accelerate climate mitigation, facilitate energy system transitions, and promote adaptation strategies that take seriously how costs are distributed, with particular attention to marginalized and vulnerable populations. Grant funds will support information gathering in the form of outreach, interviews, and listening sessions with stakeholders from relevant communities; the production of two reports, one identifying equitable emissions-lowering policies by sector and another focused on similar cross-sector policies; and dissemination efforts for both reports designed to ensure these outputs reach key stakeholders in academia, government, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector.

Available energy and environment data can be rather siloed, with datasets from different federal and state agencies difficult to link with one another due to differences in what data is collected, how it is structured, what formats are used to store it, and what metadata is attached. Connecting such disparate datasets so that they can be jointly and meaningfully analyzed represents a significant and time-consuming effort for researchers, particularly those from different disciplines who want to address broader questions of climate change, environmental justice, social welfare, or public policy. This grant supports a team of multidisciplinary team of social scientists across multiple institutions, led by Jonathan Fisk, to begin to address this issue.  Funds will support a broad initial survey of researchers across a wide range of social science disciplines to identify the most used and useful data sources in this area, gain insight into the questions researchers are attempting to answer, and understand the barriers they face in linking different datasets.  The survey will then lead to a workshop where survey responses will inform discussion of where the most pressing needs for data integration are and development of a plan for addressing them. The workshop will then be followed by an iterative process of researcher consultation that ensures future data integration plans continue to be tightly bound to researchers’ needs.

Gordon Research Conferences (GRCs) are a series of week-long interdisciplinary conferences focusing on advancing cutting-edge research across biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering, bringing together early-career and more established researchers. The purpose of these meetings is to share early-stage results and provide networking and collaboration opportunities among the participants. Many GRCs are preceded by a two-day graduate student seminar held the weekend before the conference to engage early-career researchers. This grant supports the fourth in a biennial series of conferences on Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) taking place this fall, which will bring together scientists from multiple disciplines to share novel research about developments related to removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere. Grant funds will cover registration and travel costs for up to 20 early-career researchers, including 10 from the United States and 10 from other countries, who will each attend the week-long CCUS GRC and the preceding seminar.

Most private sector software development is informed by user experience (UX) designers who work to ensure products provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users, but UX is treated as an afterthought, if considered at all, within open source scientific software. The result is that much open source scientific software with graphical user interfaces is counterintuitive and difficult to use, with predictable effects on adoption. This grant funds work by Jin Guo of McGill University and Jinghui Cheng of Polytechnique Montrйal to develop and test techniques and tools to facilitate better integration of design considerations into open source software development. An essential feature of successful UX design processes is understanding user needs and soliciting and evaluating their feedback iteratively. Facilitating such activities can be difficult, particularly on open source projects where the management team is stretched thin. Drawing on their familiarity with natural language processing and human-computer interaction, Guo and Cheng will attempt to streamline user participation in UX design through three streams of research. The first will be on tools that provide prompts, suggestions and frameworks to users to reduce vagueness and ambiguity in their design feedback, clearly demarcate problems from proposed solutions, and help ensure user comments are maximally useful to developers. The second will focus on tools that use natural language recognition to analyze, summarize, and synthesize user comments, allowing the development team to digest and prioritize feedback effectively and efficiently. The third will focus on tools that engage users in contributing pre-implementation design artifacts, like wireframes, sketches, and interface mockups.

Introductory undergraduate courses play an outsized role in steering women and students of color out of STEM majors. One recent study, reported in Talking about Leaving Revisited, found that 35% of all decisions to switch out of a STEM major could be attributed to these courses, with women leaving at significantly higher rates than men. What is less well understood, however, is what it is about these courses that cause such differential responses across race and gender. This grant funds a team led by Anne-Barrie Hunter at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to conduct a large ethnographic study of introductory STEM courses across six U.S. college campuses. Focusing on courses in mathematics, computer science, chemistry, and biology with high DFWI (grades D, F, withdrawal, or incomplete) rates, the research team will conduct 240 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with professors, administrators, instructional staff, and teaching assistants and then link the information collected with university data on student performance. Interviews will be structured to examine the role that individual—as well as departmental and institutional—incentives, beliefs, attitudes, and practices have on student outcomes with an emphasis on teaching practices. The ethnography promises to yield important, actionable insights into the mechanisms that lead to differential racial and gendered outcomes among STEM students.

This grant provides support for a series of interrelated activities designed to support and strengthen the economics department at Howard University, the nation’s leading producer of Black PhDs in economics and the only Historically Black College or University that offers a doctorate in economics. Over the three-year grant period, funds will be used to increase Howard’s capacity to recruit, educate, and graduate economics students through providing fellowship support for undergraduate students, doctoral students, and a post-doctoral researcher. In addition, grant funds will be used to augment and strengthen the resources of the Howard economics department, including an upgrade to the department’s computer lab and seminar facilities, the launch of a faculty development program, and the creation of a mentoring program that pairs students with dedicated faculty mentors.