The goal of this project is to grow and diversify the field of energy and environmental (EEE) economics by supporting an integrated set of training and early-career scholar engagement efforts taking place at the Energy Institute at Haas, based at the University of California, Berkeley. Four programmatic activities will be funded through this grant. The first is Grad Camp, a week-long, summer training course that brings 60 graduate students per year from across North American universities to the University of California, Berkeley for a rigorous introduction to cutting-edge research in EEE. The second is Energy Camp, a multi-day, early-summer gathering of 60 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, junior faculty, and more established faculty to share and work on early-stage research projects. Three promising graduate students from the previous year’s Grad Camp will be invited to attend and present at the next year’s Energy Camp. The third is the EEE Undergraduate Mentoring Program, undertaken in partnership with Berkeley’s Opportunity Lab, which will prepare 18 Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o/x undergraduates per year at Berkeley for EEE graduate study by pairing these students with graduate student and faculty mentors. The fourth is research funding for two EEE graduate students per year that are working on seed projects designed to produce publicly available datasets or outputs that can be used by other scholars in the field. This proposal will help ensure that these programs will continue to enrich the EEE field and train the next generation scholars from a diverse range of backgrounds and institutions.

This grant provides ongoing support to Pecan Street, a non-profit research organization based in Austin, Texas seeking to improve researchers’ access to high resolution residential electricity use data by instrumenting households with energy monitoring devices. Pecan Street installs eGauge devices in participating households to directly measure power flow at the level of the circuit breaker. Each household gets access to their own energy use information, and Pecan Street collects and uploads the data to Dataport, a data sharing system for academic and commercial researchers. Grant funds will allow Pecan Street to greatly expand and diversify the number of instrumented homes in the research testbed by 40%, adding at least 50 homes in each of 4 different geographies, 210 homes in total: Atlanta, Georgia; Central Pennsylvania; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Portland, Oregon. All of the newly instrumented homes supported in this project will be from communities of color or lower-income communities not yet represented in Pecan Street’s network. Pecan Street will work closely with academic researchers and local community-based organizations (CBO) in each region to engage participating households and use the collected data to study questions of interest to that particular area. Funds will allow Pecan Street to engage 750 new Dataport users, produce 10-20 journal publications, train multiple graduate students across the four local research projects, support the involvement of the CBOs, and update the Dataport infrastructure with upgraded storage and computer processing capacity. This effort will improve our ability to understand household electricity usage and, ultimately, help to facilitate the transition to low-carbon energy systems.

Though there has been an explosive rise in remote work arrangements since the Covid-19 pandemic, there is surprisingly little research on remote teamwork and its impact on creativity, productivity, and worker satisfaction. Meetings are a central feature of such teamwork. As researchers Anita Blanchard and Joseph Allen wrote in a 2022 article, 'Successful meetings lead to productive workgroups but we do not know why or how.' They argue that group identity, or 'entitativity,' can be strengthened through formal meetings alongside informal interactions over lunch or in the hallway. 'Meetings serve as the primary formal occasion in which workgroup entitativity can be maintained or repaired for optimal workgroup performance.' This grant supports an ambitious research project by Blanchard and Allen to empirically assess the degree to which (and which features of) virtual meetings produce stronger group entitativity and to test a hypothesis about whether other mechanisms for informal team awareness might improve the entitativity of virtual, distributed teams. For the latter, they will test whether adoption of Gather.town, a 2-D virtual workspace where one can engage in informal video chats with remote collaborators, increases entitativity, and then quantify its impact on measures of collaboration success. Their findings promise to advance our knowledge of team science and could inform the design of new systems for virtual team collaboration.

This grant supports the continued operation and growth of the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project.  Led by Sean Goggins and Matt Germonprez, CHAOSS is an organization devoted to the creation thriving open source software communities through the development and adoption of research-driven 'community metrics' that assess the responsiveness, engagement, inclusion, and other properties of the distributed community of developers who build and maintain a given project. Well-designed community metrics are critical signals of the resilience and sustainability of an open source project, can inform risk assessment decisions about the use of a particular piece of open source software, and can facilitate efforts to improve the well-being of project contributors and users. Since its founding, CHAOSS has grown from initially defining a handful of metrics to supporting entire systems of practice and research across industry and academia. CHAOSS’ activities include research on open source project health and sustainability, growing and supporting a community which helps define what open source project health and sustainability mean, public dissemination of databases and resources for informed decision-making, and continued maintenance and development of CHAOSS data and tools. Grant funds will support the continuation and expansion of these activities, as well as several new ones, including the launch of a new data science initiative aimed at lowering barriers to adoption; support for regional community leads in under-resourced areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the execution of plans to move the organization toward independent financial sustainability.

This grant provides ongoing support to Ian Cosden at Princeton University, who is formalizing 'US-RSE', a professional association for research software engineers (RSEs) based in the United States. RSEs are a relatively new role within research organizations and typically combine software engineering expertise with experience in specific research disciplines, a role that has become increasingly important as research teams grow more dependent on software to do their work. Grant funds will allow Cosden and the Steering Committee to scale up US-RSE’s efforts by hiring key staff members, supporting an annual conference, awarding community-driven mini-grants, and upgrading critical organizational infrastructure.