This grant provides funds to bolster the efforts of an established consortium of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI). CAHSI is dedicated to advancing Latina/o/x representation in computer science, a discipline lacking in diversity (by gender and race/ethnicity), especially at the graduate level. CAHSI pulls together more than 60 two- and four-year Hispanic Serving Institutions to learn from one another and to work with industry, non-profit, and other partners to raise computing degree attainment by Latina/o/x students. With much success behind them, CAHSI leadership is expanding its focus from undergraduate to graduate education pathways.Funds from this grant will support a series of activities designed to develop multilevel shared responsibility across the network, build multidimensional structures and cultivate a talent development mindset at CAHSI member institutions. Moreover, the project is poised to capitalize on a growing number of R1 (i.e., very high research productivity) HSIs, including through CAHSI’s involvement in the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities (HSRU), whose goals are to double the number of Hispanic doctoral students and increase by 20% the number of Hispanic faculty in their universities by 2030.

As of January 2022, Illinois state law guarantees admission to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for all students from the Community College of Chicago system with a cumulative GPA of at least 3.0. This grant supports a partnership between UIUC and Wilbur Wright College, a Hispanic Serving community college in Chicago, to help Wilbur Wright students take advantage of this new law, increase the number of Wilbur Wright students who transfer to UIUC, and enhance the educational resources available to these students, particularly those interested in STEM, so that they are well-prepared to succeed as their education continues.Primary activities funded through this grant include presentations for Wilbur Wright students and workshops for Wilbur Wright faculty on transfer and graduate opportunities; the launch of a one-week summer exploration program for Wilbur Wright students at UIUC; expanded professional development offerings and supports for Wilbur Wright students in the Transfer Pathways program, an annual STEM conference at Wilbur Wright; and sponsorships for 8-10 Wilber Wright students per year to participate in UIUC’s GearUp engineering education enrichment program. In addition, UIUC will use qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze lessons learned and promising practices from the collaboration and disseminate them to inform similar partnerships at other universities.

The Institute for Research on Innovation in Science (IRIS) maintains a dataset linking university grant and HR/procurement data with scholarly publications. That data has become essential infrastructure for the growing research community focused on measuring scientific productivity and the return on public and private investments in science. This grant funds efforts by Jinseok Kim and Jason Owen-Smith to expand this database by adding in linkages to research software, creating a new resource that can be used to begin to quantify the role software plays in scientific productivity. Unlike publications and patents, software doesn’t necessarily have well-curated author lists, and citations to software codebases are not necessarily well-structured for data mining. On the other hand, versioning platforms like Github have much more granular data on the specific contributions by individuals to codebases over time, which could enable very detailed analyses on who does what kinds of software work.In order to enable research on individual contributions to software as products of research, the IRIS team will identify relevant software repositories and link contributor usernames to the faculty, students, and staff who are represented in university records. Kim will identify software referenced in a corpus of papers, then develop algorithmic ways to match the names of software projects with active Github repositories. Next, he will use a set of name disambiguation methods to link contributors to those repositories with people already represented in the IRIS data, in the process linking those repositories and contributions to funding and other IRIS entities.

Computational modeling is a key tool for a number of scientific disciplines, but good practices in software engineering are not necessarily adopted by the developers of those models. To take one example, interoperability can be especially important to modeling, as the linking of models can be critical to particular research questions, but many models aren’t released with the metadata necessary to make this possible.Funds from this grant support the two years of activities at the Open Modeling Foundation (OMF), a modeling standards organization, aimed at advancing best practices in scientific modeling. The OMF’s activities are structured through three working groups: a Standards working group that will develop and maintain community-driven recommendations for computational modeling; a Certification working group that will develop methods to affirm when models meet those standards; and an Education and Training working group that will develop and maintain curricula to encourage best modeling practices by the broader scientific community with a particular focus on students and early career researchers. Each working group has an initial chair who will recruit one or more co-chairs within the first year, with a particular eye toward diversifying the OMF leadership.

The shift toward electrified steel production, leading to a greater reliance on utilizing renewable energy, has the potential to increase variability of steelworker schedules and job quality. This would allow steel producers to use clean energy when it is readily available and cheaper, produce and store intermediate goods, and finish the manufacturing process at a later date. Doing so, however, introduces temporal and seasonal variabilities into the steel production process that would impact the jobs of steel workers.This grant funds efforts by a team of engineers and social scientists to study the impacts on both steel workers and manufacturing processes associated with this increased adoption of renewable energy in the steel industry. The team is led by Rebecca Ciez, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering, and Partha Mukherjee, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, at Purdue University. They team will start by conducting structured interviews with 15-20 steelworkers from across Indiana to develop a framework for understanding worker decision-making processes and how they make tradeoffs about employment opportunities. These interviews will inform the development of a survey of steel workers that will be implemented throughout five states in the Great Lakes region (Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin) to help quantify how workers value different attributes of their work schedules, such as hourly wages, shift schedules, number of months worked per year, and overtime provided. Survey respondents will be recruited using a number of modalities, including engaging companies, local steelworker union chapters, and direct mailing to engage rural steel workers in areas where non-unionized steel mills are major employers. Survey results will inform the modeling of electrified hydrogen and steel production processes, focusing on better representing how renewable-based hydrogen processes might impact steelmaking production on a daily, weekly, seasonal, or yearly basis.In addition to survey results and the hydrogen electrolysis modeling framework, outputs are expected to include academic articles, policy briefs, public repositories of shared data and code, and the training of two graduate students and one undergraduate student in survey methodologies and industrial energy systems analysis. While the framework developed will initially focus on electrified and decarbonized steel manufacturing, it may eventually be expanded and applied to other industries and manufacturing processes.

Electrifying industrial manufacturing processes is one of the key pathways to decarbonizing the U.S. energy system, yet decarbonizing industry remains challenging. This grant funds research from a team of scholars led by Erin Mayfield, Assistant Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College and includes Maron Greenleaf, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, along with researchers at Carbon Solutions. This project will take an industry-wide look at the potential impacts of electrification on steel manufacturing. Two technologies are being developed that can help electrify steel production processes: direct reduction of iron ore using electricity and deploying low-carbon electricity to make hydrogen, which can then be used to make steel. Existing energy system capacity expansion models do not yet represent these electrified production pathways well.The team will model electrified technology options for replacing, retrofitting, or redeveloping the over 130 steel manufacturing sites in the United States and then expand the analysis to assess associated upgrading costs, production capacity, material demand, and labor impacts. Improving understanding as to how these electrified steelmaking processes will be implemented will require close engagement with steel industry stakeholders who are making such transition decisions. To integrate this perspective in the study, the team will conduct technical consultations with 3-5 steel manufacturing and technology development firms, and they will also conduct a set of community engagement activities by engaging local stakeholders across three steel production communities in the Upper Midwest. Additionally, the team will assemble a project advisory committee to provide feedback on the methodology and facilitate community engagement.Along with academic research articles, the primary output from this project will be a multi-objective online planning and mapping platform that can be used to model various industry-wide electrification and decarbonization scenarios, which the team plans to disseminate widely through numerous briefings. The project will involve training of two graduate students and multiple undergraduate students in industrial systems modeling, techno-economic assessment, and environmental justice. To further the community engagement portion of the work, the Sustainable Transitions Lab and Clinic at Dartmouth College will provide support to engage the community-level interview participants.

Rural areas are important, yet challenging, regions in which to advance electrification. In particular, the rural North is in a cold climate, has remote communities, has frequent need for back-up power (like generators) during periods of extreme weather, and has historically been dependent on fossil fuels. At the same time, these rural areas are also becoming likely spots for future renewable energy development, as they tend to have abundant natural resources and sparse population densities.This grant funds an interdisciplinary research team led by Ana Dyreson, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University, who will examine the technical and social barriers and opportunities for electrification in the rural northern region of the United States through three community-engaged case studies in Michigan (Baraga County), Wisconsin (Ashland and Iron counties), and Minnesota (Beltrami and Clearwater counties). Transitions associated with energy system electrification may also raises specific concerns for Tribal Nations in these rural regions, who have longstanding histories of facing energy and environmental extractivism. The project will focus on studying issues associated with electrifying space heating and cooling, a particularly essential and difficult energy load to electrify in this region. Each case study will involve a pair of surveys in each of these communities, one at the beginning of the study to better understand current heating and cooling options and the other at the end to assess perceived barriers and opportunities for electrification. Surveys will be co-designed with the members of the communities themselves, prioritizing the involvement of Tribal Nation representatives. There will also be engineering analyses to assess the potential readiness of homes in these regions to install electrified residential heating and cooling systems under current conditions and future electrification scenarios. Using the survey results and the technical readiness assessment, the team will develop a model of household energy use and combine it with regional datasets to extend their model to the broader regional level. All of this research will be undertaken with a lens toward understanding and identifying the local and regional energy justice implications of these electrification options.Additional research team members based at Michigan Technological University include Chelsea Schelly, Associate Professor of Sociology; Timothy Scarlett, Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology; and Roman Sidortsov, Associate Professor of Energy Policy. To closely engage with the communities under study, Dyreson and her team will partner with the Center for Energy and Environment (CEE), a Minnesota-based non-governmental organization with decades of experience working with rural and Indigenous communities in the region on issues related to energy development. In addition to academic outputs, the team plans to develop an online, geospatial decision-support tool that will compare future home electrification scenarios and highlight accompanying technical, equity, and policy considerations.

This grant funds a research project by a team of scholars led by Noah Dormady, Associate Professor of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, to better understand the economic, equity, and justice impacts of consumer electricity rate selection in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The academic research team includes Abdollah Shafieezadeh, Associate Professor Civil Engineering at The Ohio State University, and Alberto Lamadrid, Associate Professor of Economics from Lehigh University. They will examine the practice of consumers being offered and selecting above-market or predatory electricity rates using a number of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. His team has assembled a robust electricity market rate database for Ohio, which contains millions of entries on both default standard service offer (SSO) electricity rates and competitive retail electric service (CRES) retail rates offered to consumers. After constructing a similar CRES rate database for Pennsylvania, the team will survey consumers in both states to better understand household electricity rate selection and the distributional impacts of such retail rates among different populations, paying particular attention to engaging low-income and historically underrepresented racial and ethnic populations.The survey will be administered in the Columbus and Cleveland-Youngstown metro areas of Ohio and in the Lehigh Valley, Lancaster, Poconos, and Harrisburg areas of Pennsylvania. The team will then partner with local community organizations in both states to engage underrepresented households in the study. In Ohio, the team will work with the Mid-Ohio Food Collective (MOFC), a large food bank, and the Mahoning-Youngstown Community Action Partnership (MYCAP), a nonprofit that helps administer the Home Energy Assistance Program, and plan to partner with similar local organizations in Pennsylvania.Outputs from this project are expected to include economics and public policy articles reporting on the project’s findings in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. The team will also produce a detailed database containing daily electricity market data for both Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as a separate database containing residential survey data. All data and code used for the statistical modeling and machine learning activities will also be made public. The team plans to leverage their extensive network of partnerships in government and the private sector to ensure broad dissemination of results to germane consumer protection, industrial, and regulatory communities. Numerous graduate students and undergraduate students will be trained in this project.