This grant renews funding for a set of predoctoral fellowships in energy economics. In each of the past three academic years, Meredith Fowlie (University of California, Berkeley) and Ryan Kellogg (University of Chicago) have led a committee that solicits applications and selects a number of young academics for these two-year predoctoral fellowships. Selected fellows are generally in the final two years of their doctoral program and are conducting one or more studies examining different dimensions of the energy system. Previous fellows have come from an array of universities, including the University of Tennessee; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of California, San Diego; and Cornell University, among others. The announcement for predoctoral fellowship applications is shared widely within the economics community, and the selection committee has received approximately 20 high-quality applicants each year. Funds from this grant will fund an additional two cohorts of three fellows each. In addition to covering stipend and tuition coverage, a small amount of money is provided for purchasing necessary data and for travel to professional meetings.

The OXIDE project, based at the Johns Hopkins University, aims to advance diversity and inclusion throughout the academic career ladder in chemistry. OXIDE collects data, disseminates it to the broad chemistry community, and holds department chairs accountable for their success or failure to promote diversity in their departments. This “top-down” strategy to promote change has been shown to be successful for industry. OXIDE’s accountability strategy is largely executed at NDEW, the National Diversity Equity Workshop, an intensive two-day meeting that has been held biennially by OXIDE since 2011. Funds from this grant will support two more NDEWs, in 2019 and 2021, and the annual publication and dissemination of data on diversity equity statistics in chemistry for four years. OXIDE’s target objectives for the project period include the participation of approximately 60 chemistry department chairs in the biennial NDEW, an increase in chairs’ proficiency in the value proposition for advancing diversity and addressing known barriers to diversity equity; an increase in departmental efforts that are managed by the chair that advance local diversity equity outcomes; and a transition in organizational funding from heavy reliance on grant support to substantial reliance on funds provided by the institutions of the participants.

Funds from this grant provide support for three years of continued operation of the New York Academy of Science’s Science Alliance Leadership Training (SALT) program. The program aims to provide leadership training to a yearly cohort of 30 early-career scientists drawn from members of the NYAS Science Alliance. Cohorts are intentionally selected to promote diversity and prior cohorts have included significant numbers of women and underrepresented minorities. Supported activities for each cohort include a five-day intensive workshop followed by monthly webinars for nine months to expand and reinforce leadership skills. Additional funds will support a longitudinal analysis of program participants to enable rigorous evaluation of program impacts.

In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico, devastating the island and disrupting most scientific research and education. Sloan responded by granting $4,000 to each of 35 chemical and chemical engineering graduate students at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagьez (UPRM) and Rio Piedras, allowing them to use the funds in whatever way they saw fit to best continue their educations. Disruptions continue, however, and this grant to the University of Puerto Rico provides enhanced funding to help doctoral STEM students continue their educations in the wake of Maria and Irma. Grant funds will allow 24 doctoral students to conduct research for four to six months at a collaborating mainland laboratory; support a lecture series at UPRM; and provide travel funds for faculty to attend scientific conferences and meetings and for graduate students to visit mainland campuses for supplementary mentoring, including practice job talks. Additional funds will support data collection and analysis that will allow evaluation of program impacts.

Funds from this grant support a project by Tara S. Kahan, Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, in collaboration with Jianshun Zhang, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, at Syracuse University to examine indoor photon fluxes and determine concentrations, sources, and sinks of indoor oxidants and oxidant precursors. The project will combine laboratory, field, and chamber studies to better understand oxidizing capacity from emerging precursors in residences. Kahan will investigate the sources and sinks of indoor oxidants by measuring oxidant precursor concentrations in three residences, measuring indoor photon fluxes under a range of conditions, and determining oxidant concentrations via chamber experiments that simulate indoor conditions. The results will be shared through peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Environmental Sciences & Technology and Indoor Air. The team also plans to make presentations at conferences and meetings, including meetings of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate and the American Association for Aerosol Research. One postdoctoral scholar, three graduate students, and one undergraduate student will be trained on this project.

Reactive nitrogen species—nitrous acid (HONO), ammonia (NH3), and amines (NR3)—are present indoors. These reactive nitrogen species are important because of the associated chemical and physical transformations. Outdoors, amines are implicated in particle formation. And HONO is photolabile, which means it decomposes in the presence of light, generating the important oxidant hydroxyl radical. Hydroxyl radicals can then rapidly react with volatile organic compounds, leading to secondary aerosol formation. Detecting concentrations of these chemicals is vital to answering key questions about the chemistry of indoor environments, such as “What is the role of ammonia and amines in indoor chemistry?” and “To what extent do they contribute to new particle formation?” This grant funds a team led by Trevor VandenBoer, Visiting Professor of Chemistry at York University, that aims to develop analytical platforms for the detection of reactive nitrogen indoors. The work plan has three parts. First, the team plans to develop new selective sampling methodologies for the passive collection of HONO, ammonia, and amines in indoor environments. Second, they plan to design and construct a real-time monitor for HONO and total reactive nitrogen that can discriminate between gas and particulate pools. Finally, they will validate the new methods both against traditional benchmarks and through deployment in various indoor environments. The team plans to share their findings through peer-reviewed articles and presentations at several scientific and professional conferences. One postdoctoral fellow, three graduate students, and numerous undergraduates will be trained in the course of the project.

Funds from this grant support a team led by Brent Williams of Washington University in St. Louis to improve our ability to collect and analyze indoor air samples through the development of a chemically resolved volatility and polarity separator. The project aims to build and test a new field-deployable automated instrument for the simultaneous measurement of organic gas and particle chemical composition. The work plan has three parts. First, Williams and his team will develop a modified volatility and polarity separator capable of detailed chemical characterization of the particle phase and gas phase of airborne indoor organic material. Next they will demonstrate the strengths of the new measurement capacity through controlled laboratory studies and through an indoor field study. Last, they will develop an open-access volatility- and polarity-separated chemical profile database of indoor sources and transformations, along with open-access data analysis codes for use by the indoor air research community. Predicted outcomes of this project include the new instrument, the open access data base, and new knowledge about the composition of indoor air. The team plans to share their findings through multiple peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations on instrument development and through open-access chemical databases and analysis codes. One postdoctoral fellow and three graduate students will be trained.

Mass spectrometry is a technique that ionizes chemical species and then sorts them by mass. While useful, spectrometry does not distinguish between chemical isomers, species with the same number and types of atoms as another chemical species. This is important; isomers possess distinct properties because their atoms are arranged into different chemical structures. Isomers may differ, for instance, in reactivity, vapor pressure, and the identity of products. This grant will support work by Delphine Farmer, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Colorado State University, in collaboration with Ellison Carter, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, to develop and test novel software for time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometry that will allow researchers to identify isomers based on differences in binding energy. Funded work includes software development, calibration, and validation using both individual isomers and mixtures of isomers, and field testing in an unoccupied residence. The project will result in new software for both data acquisition and analysis, as well as field datasets, for sharing with the broader scientific community. The findings will be shared through publications from the instrument development component of the proposal, and additional publications when the instrument is used in an indoor study. The project will train at least one Ph.D. student in indoor chemistry and mass spectrometry instrument development.

Funds from this grant support a team lead by Virginia Tech’s Gabriel Isaacman-VanWertz to improve our ability to detect chemical isomers indoors through the development of a field-deployable gas chromatograph coupled to a chemical ionization mass spectrometer. This proposed research is divided into three technical tasks: First, Issacman-VanWertz will engineer the physical and technical interface between the major instrument components. Then he will characterize and calibrate the new instrument. Finally, he will deploy the instrument in an on-campus controlled indoor environment to examine emissions. The team plans to share their findings through peer-reviewed articles and presentations at several scientific and professional conferences.

Test bed studies require Chemistry of Indoor Environment researchers to be able to make important indoor chemistry measurements quickly and at low cost. Unfortunately, there are no good low-cost sensors for volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This grant funds an effort to build one. It’s an important effort. Many VOCs are harmful to human health and even those that aren’t can react with oxidants, eventually leading to new particle and aerosol formation. Over the next three years, Jesse Kroll—Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—will attempt to develop a low-cost monitor for measurements of volatile organic compounds in the indoor environment. The work plan has two major parts: the construction, characterization, and optimization of the VOC monitor, and the use of several such monitors in real indoor environments, providing both a proof-of-concept and initial measurements of indoor VOC levels. The primary output of this project will be the monitor and associated algorithms as well as the associated research results. Descriptions of the optimized monitor design and calibration algorithms will be disseminated broadly via the peer-reviewed, open-access literature and conference presentations. At least one graduate student will be trained.