This grant funds the Aspen Institute to host a three-year dialogue series, The Aspen Series on Energy Governance, which will synthesize the disparate strands of research that Sloan and other funders have supported in recent years on hydraulic fracturing and shale oil and gas development. The series will consist of three annual forums and two smaller-scale dialogue series that will bring together scholars and practitioners from different fields to develop a set of guidelines and recommendations related to how to oversee shale oil and gas production at the local, state, and federal levels. Discussion papers will be prepared to inform each of the meetings in the series, and a rapporteur will produce a report to summarize the collective results. The Aspen Institute will also develop a web resource that will include materials created for each session in the series and that will serve as a one-stop-shop for all of the publicly available research that the Sloan and Mitchell Foundations have supported on shale gas and oil development. Findings from the discussion series will be presented at public panels and workshops, both in Washington, D.C. and in regions where shale gas and oil development has taken place.

This grant supports energy economist Christopher Knittel in his plans to implement a randomized controlled trial to study how individuals respond to information about their driving habits and how the provision of such information affects energy use and automobile fuel economy. In partnership with a company named Automatic, which manufactures and installs driving activity monitoring devices and provides that information to drivers, Knittel will examine how individual driving behavior is influenced by different kinds of information, packaged in a variety of ways. Automatic’s devices can detect and alert drivers during hard accelerations, hard braking, and speeds over 70 miles per hour. Knittel will study how different ways of presenting these data differentially affect driving behavior. Treatment groups will receive weekly aggregated summaries and comparisons of their driving habits to other drivers. In addition, Knittel will study how sustained exposure to these alerts (at either three or six months) changes driving habits. Though Automatic’s sensors will be installed free of charge to participants, individuals will be given the opportunity to purchase the devices, at different prices, at the study’s conclusion, allowing Knittel to estimate participants’ willingness to pay for this information. The transportation sector is the second largest energy consumer in the United States and accounts for over a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This innovative RCT will help us understand better what interventions might lead consumers to change their driving habits in ways that reduce those emissions.

There are few, if any, reputable studies examining the public perception and public finance dimensions associated with the siting of energy infrastructure, which includes projects such as transmission lines, oil and natural gas pipelines, natural gas export terminals, large-scale wind and solar facilities, and  other large power plants. The studies that have been conducted have tended to focus on a single energy infrastructure project instead of looking across multiple projects simultaneously and have asked about hypothetical energy infrastructure developments instead of real-world examples. This grant funds a team led by David Konisky at Indiana University to conduct highly localized public opinion surveys related to 15 energy infrastructure projects that are currently in the planning stages across seven populous states. In addition to surveying local residents, the team will field complementary national surveys that will examine how public perceptions differ across infrastructure types. Finally, the team will develop a series of local public finance case studies laying out the likely economic impacts of a subset of these infrastructure projects, drawing on information from permit applications, siting and development plans, evidence from public hearings, and interviews with local officials and other stakeholders. All of the survey data, codebooks, and finance analysis will be publicly released at the end of the project, with the material to be archived at Harvard’s Dataverse.

Though most of the 99 operating nuclear reactors in the United States are likely to be retired by 2050, only four new nuclear plants are currently under construction. Since nuclear accounts for 20 percent of all U.S. electricity generation, significant new investment in nuclear generating technology is needed if the United States and the world are to keep a key source of no-carbon power generation. Doing so will require addressing cost, safety, waste, and proliferation concerns and a keen assessment of new reactor designs, technology development needs, new business models, and regulatory barriers.   This grant provides partial support to MIT to examine the potential of alternative nuclear generation technologies from cost, safety, reliability, waste, and proliferation perspectives. The study will also examine the associated research and development needs, regulatory reforms, and industrial support infrastructure needed to commercialize these new technologies. A faculty committee of top researchers from multiple disciplines has been assembled for the study, including Jacopo Buongiorno, Dennis Whyte, and Richard Lester of MIT and Michael Corradini of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. David Petti, of Idaho National Laboratory, will oversee the operational and management dimensions of the study as its executive director. An expert advisory board comprised of senior scholars and practitioners in the field will provide regular oversight of the overall project. The study is a crucial and necessary step in evaluating what role nuclear should play in the future of U.S. electricity generation.

Recent technological advances have made it possible to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to software projects, allowing authors to cite them in just the same way they have traditionally cited a journal article or study. Yet we have not seen much movement toward the actual citation of software by authors—a problem, since citation remains the primary way to acknowledge valuable work among scientists. The problem appears to be cultural, not technical, and it thus makes sense to focus on change at a disciplinary level. Astronomy presents an ideal opportunity to model a best-practice approach to software citation in the sciences. This grant funds an effort by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to develop and implement a new "software broker" system that would automate the creation and management of metadata about software versions, licensing, and authorship. The move would prompt software developers to fully document their code in structured ways that could easily be imported into discovery tools like the Astronomical Data Service (ADS), which tracks citations across formal and preprint articles and serves as a search interface across the astronomy literature. Though developed within astronomy, most of the systems and workflows to be developed are generic and applicable much more broadly.

This grant provides partial support for a longitudinal study of the microbiomes of dormitories and their inhabitants at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA). Over the course of nine weeks, a University of Colorado research team led by principal investigator Christopher Lowry and Lt. Col. Andrew Hoisington will sample indoor and outdoor surfaces at USAFA dormitories, characterize environmental conditions, and take skin and stool samples from a cohort of 48 U.S. Air Force cadets. Samples will then be analyzed to determine the degree to which the dorm room locations of cadets and their interactions with each other influence the microbial profiles of the cadets and their dorm rooms. The uniformity of the dorm room construction and the unique standardization in diet, lifestyle, and age among cadets makes them a particularly attractive target for study that will maximize researchers’ ability to detect confounding factors that impact host-derived microbial colonization of the dormitories. The team plans to share its findings through conference presentations, open access peer-reviewed publications, social media, and websites. The team also plans a symposium to share findings and discuss how current and future research directions in human and built environment microbiomes might advance the aims of the Department of Defense.

This grant supports two additional years of research by a team at the Berkeley Indoor Microbial Research Consortium, which aims to expand our understanding of the microbial ecology of the built environment as mediated by interactions among organisms, particulate matter, and volatile and nonvolatile chemicals. Under the direction of principal investigator (PI) Thomas Bruns, professor of plant and microbial ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, the proposed work plan is organized around four objectives: Build an integrated understanding of the role of occupancy and occupant behaviors on bioaerosols and microbially derived chemical emissions in residential environments. The biological measurements will be made in collaboration with the Berkeley Chemistry of Indoor Environments (CIE) team (see Berkeley CIE proposal) as part of the intensive field campaign taking place in one-to-two residences. Characterize the chemistry of biological interactions among microorganisms on residential indoor surfaces, incorporating both mVOC measurements and the study of nonvolatile chemical compounds, as measured through nanospray desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (NanoDESI MS). Determine the metabolic state and activity of indoor microbes. Develop improved methods for sampling and assaying microbial communities in built environments. Research findings will be shared through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at conferences and meetings, and through blogs on microBE.net. At least three postdoctoral fellows will be trained in the course of the project.

Funds from this grant support work by Gary Burtless to measure how employers’ benefit costs vary with age of employees. Burtless will use data from nationally representative microcensus files to obtain reliable estimates of the costs facing employers who hire or retain older workers rather than equally qualified younger workers who are paid the same wage. Cost differences to be examined include health insurance coverage for workers at different ages; compensation for scheduled and unscheduled leave, in particular for sickness; costs associated with the possibility that an older worker’s career will end sooner than that of an equally qualified younger worker; and retirement benefit costs, particularly under defined-benefit plans. Once calculated, these costs will be evaluated against a series of alternate policies that could reduce differences between older and younger workers.