Funds from this grant support an initiative by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to create a research working group on energy infrastructure. Bringing together leading economists as well as junior scholars entering the field, the working group aims to develop and implement a research agenda focused on two issue areas: the transport of hydrocarbons and the increase in distributed energy generation and storage. Spurred by the discovery of new oil and gas resources in the U.S., research in the first issue area will explore the economic costs, benefits, and policy issues associated with moving oil and methane by truck, rail, and pipeline. Research in the second issue area will focus on issues such as the expanding market for rooftop solar panels, utilization of electric vehicles as backup battery power, developments in smart grid technologies, and how these new technologies interact with existing energy generation and distribution infrastructure. Grant funds will support an initial workshop on each of the two topic areas, the development and implementation of up to 16 separate studies, and a capstone conference for the presentation of research results. The effort will be led by James Bushnell from the University of California, Davis; Ryan Kellogg from the University of Michigan; and Erin Mansur from Dartmouth College.

This grant provides three years of continued support to the E2e project, a multi-institutional collaboration of researchers who have come together to examine the “energy efficiency paradox,” the name given to the puzzling phenomenon of consumers’ failure to widely adopt money-saving energy efficiency practices, products, and technologies. Headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley and with organizational nodes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, the E2e collaboration brings scholars and students together to share and access data, connect with policymakers and the private sector, and work together on the design and implementation of individual and joint research projects. Topics being investigated by E2e researchers include understanding consumer decision-making in the residential sector; how framing, discounting, and choice architecture contribute to informational and behavioral inefficiencies; how to use insights from behavioral psychology and economics to increase the impact of policy interventions; and how well engineering models predict actual real world efficiency gains of adopted technologies. Grant funds provide operating support for the project, including funds for the expansion of the research network to include new scholars, publication of a working paper and policy brief series, data acquisition, a seed funding competition for junior scholars, the development of an online tool to help researchers craft effective experimental design, and a series of training workshops for students and practitioners.

Funds from this grant provide two years of support to the Women in Energy project at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) as it undertakes a series of educational, networking, mentorship, and career-development activities aimed at supporting and encouraging the involvement of female students in careers related to energy. Funded activities include organizing lectures and small group conversations with leading women in the energy sector, arranging visits for female students to key energy sites in the region, developing a formal mentoring program that connects students with leading women in the energy sector, and offering a handful of small stipends to female students to defray the cost of summer internship opportunities.

The sustainability of scientific data repositories is a matter of much concern. One recent success story is the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), a plant biology database that shifted from a grant-funded to a community-funded business model through the strategic development of a discriminating paywall that grants free, limited access to many users while requiring a sliding scale paid subscription for full, unlimited access. TAIR Director Eva Huala believes that a more flexible version of this paywall software could enable many other data repositories to develop their own variations on this model. While there are several for-profit startups offering such services, none offer the functionality needed by scientific data repositories, and these repositories appear to be much too small a market to draw those startups' focus. Funds from this grant will support Phoenix Bioinformatics, the 501(c)3 that runs TAIR, in its efforts to develop a flexible, portable version of its paywall software that could be used by a wide variety of scientific data repositories.

Recent field investigations of the microbiology of the built environment have demonstrated that the biological composition of indoor air and building surfaces is vastly more complex than previously thought. Very little is known, however, about the fundamental ecology of the microbes that colonize these locations. This grant supports efforts by a research team led by Jack Gilbert, associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, to develop new knowledge about the metabolism of indoor microbial communities using experimental and modeling approaches. The team plans to examine how different building surface materials, under variable temperature and humidity conditions, influence microbial growth, evolution, and survival and will develop a mechanistic model that can predict the succession and metabolism of microbial communities on surfaces. Dr. Gilbert and his team will seed tile, laminate, wood, and metal surfaces with defined microbial consortia acquired from human skin, dog fur, and soil, and observe microbial community succession under various temperature and humidity conditions. Their observations will test a number of important hypotheses, including how humidity affects the diversity of metabolically active bacteria and fungi, whether taxonomic diversity of active microbes decreases over time, how air temperature affects cell grow rates, and how the bacteria-to-phage ratio in a given microbial community affects overall community size.   If successful, the project will result in new knowledge about bacterial succession in the built environment and provide a mechanistic model to improve understanding of the metabolic activities of indoor microbes. The team plans to share their findings through publications in peer-reviewed journals, presentations at meetings and conferences, and through the use of social and traditional media. At least two postdoctoral fellows and two graduate students will be trained.

Researchers identify indoor microbes based on sequence data, i.e., analysis of DNA that is isolated from samples taken indoors. Though DNA sequencing has led to the discovery of a vast array of new indoor microbes, important gaps in our knowledge remain. We have an increasingly detailed picture of which microbes thrive indoors, but we don’t know what those microbes are doing. Enter mass spectronomy, an analytical chemistry technique that identifies the types and amounts of chemicals in a sample based on molecular weight. By using mass spectronomy to analyze indoor samples for chemicals produced by microbial metabolism, researchers can peer into the actual workings of indoor microbial communities. This grant funds a project by microbiologist Rob Knight of the University of Colorado and Pieter Dorrestein, professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego, to expand the capabilities of two popular software platforms, QIIME and GNPS, to enable each to integrate sequence data, metabolic data, and building science measurements and permit researchers to easily perform DNA analysis and chemical data analysis on the same samples. The expanded systems will allow scholars to examine related microbial and metabolic processes directly in samples from the built environment, and in some cases to reanalyze samples already collected.