A recent study of undergraduates across five Big Ten research universities found that women in large classes in biology, chemistry, physics, accounting, and economics performed about a third of a grade point lower (e.g. A- to B+) than similarly situated men. Understanding the basis for this gendered performance difference has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of the poorer persistence patterns of women and other demographic groups in STEM, and to the development of means by which those differences can be eliminated. This grant funds an effort by University of Michigan physicist Timothy A. McKay to assemble a broad coalition of university collaborators to jointly undertake further research and interventions. The acronym for the project is SEISMIC, for the Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses project, appropriately reflecting the opportunity for powerful disruption of an entrenched system. SEISMIC will bring together 11 institutions, each contributing a team of approximately 10 faculty members, students, and staff. The teams will examine all introductory STEM courses on all campuses through current analytics and engage in parallel data analysis, data sharing, coordinated experiments, a continuous exchange of speakers (about 60 per year), and extended annual summer meetings. Attention will be paid to the diversity of institutions chosen. Gender will continue to be an object of study, and the project will also examine other student demographics including race/ethnicity, first-generation (first-gen) college students, and various forms of intersectionality, e.g., Latina women or first-gen men. A planning meeting and three annual collaboration summer meetings will be held to accelerate research, build community, and enhance the spread of ideas. Results will be disseminated broadly through presentations at national professional meetings and publication in several peer-reviewed articles that will reach broad STEM and STEM-education audiences.

This grant provides two years of support for a new multi-institutional leadership development program for mid-career STEM faculty of color in the Boston area. Participating universities include Northeastern University, Boston University, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Suffolk University, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Successful applicants to the program will attend an initial, four-day workshop that focuses on self-assessment, skills building, and creation of a networked cohort. The workshop will be followed with individualized mentoring by seven institutional leaders about governance and successfully navigating the institutional structure of a university. Finally, participants will develop team projects that they will execute, evaluate, and then present to a group of provosts and deans. All program participants will be tracked for two-years after completion of the program to gauge its effects.

This grant funds a research project by Rachel Adams, research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, to expand our understanding of how microorganisms shape the chemistry of indoor environments. Adams and colleagues will undertake a series of controlled chamber experiments to identify the boundaries of microbial production of chemical volatile organic compounds due to humidity on various surfaces fundamental to homes, including drywall, carpets, and wood. The team also plans to investigate the relative importance of growth substrate, including the dust matrix in which most household environmental microbes are embedded, and, by varying substrate and inoculum in a controlled manner, of microbial taxonomic identity. In addition to creating a more thorough inventory of MVOCs, these research activities will determine how changing environmental conditions underlie the microbial processes that determine chemical emissions. This project will result in new knowledge about microbially mediated processes that impact the chemistry of indoor spaces. The results will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at meetings and workshops. Two undergraduate, one master’s and one Ph.D. student will be trained.

This grant funds a research project by Jonathan Williams, research group leader, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in collaboration with Pawel Wargocki, associate professor at the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) that will investigate the impact of exhaled and dermally emitted human emissions in climate chambers under different conditions of clothing, temperature, relative humidity, and ozone. Volatile organic compound (VOCs) emissions will be characterized by Williams and his team using state-of-the-art proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry (PTR-TOF-MS). Novel analytical techniques developed by Williams for outdoor use will be used to measure OH reactivity of the human emissions, which will account for any “missing” emissions.   Twin stainless steel climate chambers located at the DTU will be used to measure how human emissions vary between cold and dry versus hot and humid conditions, and how human emissions change with the presence of ozone and with different clothing. Williams’ experiments will allow for the isolation of exhaled versus dermally emitted bio effluents and the contribution if each to OH reactivity will be separately measured. These measurements will allow Williams to make the first ever OH reactivity–based budget of the human-influenced indoor environment and will reveal what proportion of human emissions currently can be measured and what proportion is “missing.” This new knowledge will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. At least one postdoctoral fellow will be trained.

This grant supports research by Andrew Ault, Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Chemistry at the University of Michigan, to examine the pH of indoor surfaces and answer two related questions: “What are the properties of aqueous films on indoor surfaces?” and, more specifically, “What is the pH of surface water layers indoors?” To this end, Ault will determine the properties of water layers and range of pH values present on the surface of six common building materials—glass, concrete, drywall, latex painted drywall, carpet, and wood—as well as six associated proxy model systems—silicon dioxide, quicklime (cement)/limestone (aggregate), gypsum, synthetic rubber, nylon, and cellulose. Materials will be studied before and after aging for six months in a residential environment. The project will determine the water and water layer properties (including island formation, structured water, and accessible water fraction) as a function of relative humidity (RH) for different materials, model systems, and aged samples. The project also will reveal the intrinsic pH of the samples as a function of RH, as well as the differences in pH for aged samples across spatial scales ranging from nano to macro. Last, Ault and his team will determine the sensitivity of pH to gaseous acids and bases and acidic aerosols and associated kinetics.

A vexing problem in studies of volcanism, and outgassing more generally, is that there is much that satellites cannot see, but it is terribly dangerous to get close enough to measure emissions of interest when things are most active—and usually very hot. Drones could vastly improve the completeness of monitoring of outgassing, affordably. DECADE, the Deep Earth Carbon Degassing project, is a collaboration within the Deep Carbon Observatory that uses new and established technologies to determine accurate global fluxes of volcanic CO2 to the atmosphere. So far DECADE has installed CO2 monitoring networks on 20 of the world’s 150 most actively degassing volcanoes. Funds from this grant support efforts by Emma Nicholson Liu to pioneer integration of drones into volcanic monitoring by experimenting with their use in monitoring a pair of previously uncharacterized emission sources in Papua, New Guinea. In addition to drone development, deployment, and analysis of data, the team plans two short movies for general audiences.  

Peter Fox leads a team at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) that both conducts original deep carbon research and provides data management services to the scientists working in the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). Funds from this grant will allow Fox and his crew to continue to lead these data science efforts for the final 15 months of the DCO. To date, RPI researchers and tools have made possible breakthroughs by the DCO in, for example, understanding the “social life of minerals,” that is, co-occurrence of minerals, especially carbon-based ones. And RPI efforts have led to fast adoption by DCO researchers of the Jupyter notebook, the popular, web-based interactive computational platform. Going forward, grant funds will support RPI efforts to stimulate and visualize DCO discoveries, and to assure that data, models, publications, and other information are archived and accessible.