This grant continues a partnership with New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) to commission, develop, and produce science and technology plays. Over the next three years, MTC will commission between 18 and 24 new plays from both rising and established playwrights that explore scientific themes or feature scientists, engineers, inventors, or mathematicians as major characters. Commissions are selected twice yearly in consultation with an independent scientific advisory panel that serves as a year-round resource to help playwrights ensure scientific accuracy. In addition to the commissions, grant funds will support three-to-four readings or workshops for Foundation-commissioned plays per year, and one annual presentation of a Foundation-developed play before a public audience of over 100 people.

The E2e network is a consortium of scholars evaluating the impact of energy efficiency programs using randomized controlled trials and high-quality quasi-experimental research. Under the leadership of Catherine Wolfram (University of California, Berkeley), Michael Greenstone (University of Chicago), and Christopher Knittel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the network has grown since its 2012 launch to include nearly 30 affiliated faculty and has produced close to 40 papers on the cost-benefit impacts of energy efficiency programs. Practitioners in state governments have started to take notice and there is a growing desire to infuse government evaluations of energy efficiency programs with the rigor that E2e researchers bring to their academic studies. This grant provides funds to place at least two “E2e Evidence-Based Policy Fellows” within select state energy agencies to serve as a resource to agency staff, to improve plans for evaluating energy efficiency programs, and to advise agency policymakers on the initial design and implementation of such programs. Fellows will be supervised on a daily level by an agency supervisor and will hold regular check-ins with the E2e faculty leads.

This grant provides support for a series of intensive, week-long summer training programs for early-career economists and social scientists to introduce these scholars to the technological and engineering dimensions of electricity distribution systems. This Colorado Technology Primer for Economists and Social Scientists has been well received and well attended by doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and assistant professors across several fields, including economics, public policy, and environmental sustainability. Topics covered include an introduction to power system planning and operation, distribution system principles, grid interface with bulk power supply, determinants of electricity demand, and opportunities and challenges presented by multidisciplinary research. Grant funds provide two years of operational support for the effort.

The Energy Journalism Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy brings together nearly 20 journalists annually for a week-long seminar that introduces reporters to the latest research findings related to a wide range of energy issues. Topics covered at the seminar address issues such as energy economics, new technology development, energy policy, and energy security.  Funds from this grant provide support for the operation of the Energy Journalism Initiative for two years, along with funds for expanded outreach and ongoing engagement with the energy journalism community.

Funds from this grant support a multidimensional national effort by the Association of American Universities (AAU) to help make U.S. graduate education more student-centered. The need for such an effort stems from a recognition that the organization of much of graduate education has been too focused on the singular goal of research productivity at the expense of preparing doctoral students for a broader array of professional careers inside and outside the academy. AAU will run a pilot program at 8 universities drawn from its 62 highly respected member institutions. Over the course of three years, two departments from each university will conduct analyses to support the development and implementation of action plans to provide greater support for students’ pursuits of diverse Ph.D. career pathways The project will also increase transparency by making Ph.D. and career outcomes data readily available, and foster cross-institutional learning and broad dissemination of effective strategies and practices through workshops, virtual webinars, and activities aimed at fostering more student-centered educational environments for all doctoral students.

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.