Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) and Independent System Operators (ISOs) have a substantial, critical impact on the function of the energy system. Each RTO and ISO is structured and governed differently, yet there is little research on how each of these entities operate. This grant builds on previous Sloan-funded research and provides ongoing support to an interdisciplinary research network, called the RTOGov network, that has is filling this knowledge gap, bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines and institutions. Now led by Seth Blumsack at Pennsylvania State University and Stephanie Lenhart at Boise State University, RTOGov will study how these entities operate and function, how each compares or contrasts with one another, and how differences in organizational structure and governance impact the service they provide to energy systems and customers. This phase will allow scholars in the network to undertake more comparative regional governance studies across institutions as well as examine broader policy issues associated with federal requirements for RTO governance. Building on practitioner collaborations established during the first phase of the project, RTOGov scholars will focus on sharing lessons learned to contribute to the formation of emerging RTO-like entities that are actively being designed in regions like the Southeast, Mountain West, and Alaska. Grant funds will allow RTOGov to produce at least 12-15 papers for academic journals in multiple fields and associated policy briefs or white papers; engage a diverse range of 25-30 additional contributing scholars; support the training of at least 8-10 students; and continue to provide guidance to practitioners. RTOGov also plans to organize and host 6 semi-annual research workshops that will gather participating researchers, contributors, and advisory committee members.

Researchers have developed a new generation of energy system models representing U.S. electricity generation, transmission, and demand that promises to help decisionmakers understand how different policies will speed or inhibit the decarbonization of the U.S. energy system. Yet these models differ in various respects, and there is a need to gain insight about how these individual energy system models compare to one another. To fully unlock the decision-making usefulness of these powerful next generation energy system models, a nuanced understanding is needed to determine how the evaluations produced by these models vary and what features of the models explain such variance. This grant supports research by a multi-institution team led by Oleg Lugovoy at the Environmental Defense Fund to compare a set of cutting-edge, open-source electricity system planning models across a range of different decarbonization scenarios. Lugovoy’s team will compare four models (known as GenX, Switch, Temoa, and USENSYS) using the PowerGenome platform to conduct their comparisons and analyze the results. The models will be compared across two decarbonization scenarios, a business-as-usual scenario and a high-renewables scenario, all drawing on the same input data. Grant funds will allow the team to produce 4-6 publications, train 2 postdoctoral researchers in energy system modeling intercomparison, produce a GitHub data repository, and disseminate model comparison results to practitioner stakeholders. Finally, the team will convene 2-4 public workshops to train those interested in learning how to use the open-source models and the results of the model intercomparison project.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one of the Sloan Foundation’s longest running basic science programs, with a nearly 25-year period of continuous observation shedding light on some of the most important questions in astronomy and astrophysics. The fifth phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) consists of an all-sky, multi-epoch spectroscopic survey observing the universe in both the visible and the infrared portion of the spectrum. SDSS-V will observe the entire sky using two complementary telescopes—one at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and a second at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile—allowing it to map the night sky more fully, with the Chilean telescope able to observe core parts of the Milky Way not visible in the Northern Hemisphere. Grant funds will allow SDSS-V to conduct its originally planned, full five-year observation program and observe multiple objects, at multiple distances, across three constituent sub-surveys: the Milky Way Mapper, which will study the history of our own galaxy; the Black Hole Mapper, which will observe the behavior of supermassive blackholes that sit at the center of galaxies; and the Local Volume Mapper, which will examine the interstellar medium in key regions of the Milky Way and other galaxies. This grant will allow SDSS-V to complete the upgrade to a new robotic focal plane observation system, complete the construction of the Local Volume Mapper instrumentation hardware, and extend the SDSS-V observation period to 2026-2027.

Determining how to advance deep decarbonization efforts in the United States is a big picture issue that requires research and analysis on many fronts. Early in 2021, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released a Sloan-funded consensus study report, titled Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System,which identifies both key technical and socioeconomic goals to help the U.S. achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and the near-term federal policies that would set the U.S. on a path to meet those goals. This grant will expand the work of the NASEM committee to further explore the implementation of deep decarbonization interventions in the United States energy system. The first component of this next phase of work is producing a second consensus study on aspects of deep decarbonization not covered in the first report, focusing on issues like environmental justice, the impacts on jobs, and the role of sub-national policies. Second, this grant will help to establish an ongoing Deep Decarbonization Forum to address current and future deep decarbonization issues with a wide range of stakeholders.

This grant provides ongoing support for Stefano DellaVigna at the University of California, Berkeley, and Eva Vivalt at the University of Toronto, who are scaling up their Social Science Prediction Platform (SSPP), an online platform for collecting and cataloguing forecasts about the results of social science experiments. Documenting such forecasts is an increasingly used and useful way to help evaluate the importance of social scientific studies. Among other reasons, it creates a baseline from which to measure the novelty or unexpectedness of a social scientific result or finding. It can also serve as a useful measure of scientific consensus around important or contested issues in a field. Grant funds will allow DellaVigna and Vivalt to include more research projects in the platform, to include more than 5,000 new forecasts, and to include new applications for predictions such as measuring the effectiveness of policy interventions. Funds will enable the team to run conferences and workshops; to produce training materials and outreach activities; to recruit a large and diverse sample of forecasters; and to develop new methodologies and platform capabilities.

This grant supports Sanjay Patnaik, director at the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets (CRM), which promotes independent, unbiased, and non-partisan research on regulatory economics. Grant funds will allow CRM to conduct research on topics including artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, financial market regulation and fintech, and consumer protection and antitrust in the digital age. Through its research, CRM seeks to explore how novel technologies can best be regulated without stifling innovation; how the regulatory process could be adapted to quickly respond to changing market conditions; and how regulation can deal with new approaches to data privacy. In addition to producing high-quality and policy-relevant research on regulatory economics, CRM will disseminate this work through academic papers, policy briefs, and events that connect researchers with practitioners.

This grant provides support for the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium, led by Dr. Julie Posselt at the University of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education. The Consortium brings together change-ready universities, graduate programs, and leaders to align policies and practices with commitments to equity and inclusion. Building off the successful California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE),  grant funds will allow Posselt’s team to develop a tiered membership model for the expanded consortium; host activities, including a workshop series and training for campus-based facilitators; create new modules, curricula, and facilitation guides; develop a framework for enacting systemic change in graduate education; and work with their new and existing institutional partners to create equity action plans tailored to the needs and circumstances of each university. In addition to other public and private universities, participating campuses include Sloan’s University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring institutions.

While tax data is highly sought after by social scientists, it is costly, sensitive, and difficult to access. The IRS has historically released public-use files—privacy-protected databases of sampled individual income tax returns—but has stopped producing them due to high costs and high vulnerability to re-identification attacks. This grant provides ongoing support for Claire Bowen at the Urban Institute, who is working with the IRS to develop synthetic versions of individual income tax return data. Synthetic data has mathematical and statistical properties that are similar to those of the real data, but that contains almost no private information from the original dataset. Grant funds will allow Bowen to continue developing two synthetic datasets, making substantial methodological improvements and exploring the application of differential privacy methods to assess the privacy attributes of this methodology. In addition, Bowen will make open-source code available on GitHub, document the methodology for use by other agencies, and disseminate the work through a white paper, blog posts, presentations, and journal articles.

The Sloan University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) initiative is a series of grants to universities around the country that are working to transform graduate education to better attract, enroll, and graduate Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o/x doctoral students in STEM fields. Grant funds primarily provide direct support to graduate students to be used in support of their studies. The remaining funds support a diverse and interrelated set of activities and resources designed to create an equitable, inclusive, and supportive educational environment conducive to successful doctoral completion and subsequent career success. The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering acts as the Foundation’s partner and fiscal steward for the program. This grant provides three years of continued support to the UCEMs housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, San Diego.

This grant supports Joseph Brewer and a largely Indigenous-led project team at the University of Kansas (KU) to improve Indigenous representation in the STEM professoriate and workforce by piloting a Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) program at their university. SIGP is a coalition of nine higher education institutions devoted to creating and sustaining inclusive, connected, and supportive educational environments conducive to successful advanced degree completion and subsequent career success for Indigenous students. Brewer and project team member Melinda Adams are themselves SIGP alumni. Grant funds will support the Kansas team in providing robust funding packages for SIGP Sloan Scholars; developing and offering training and resources to university faculty to improve their skills and abilities in mentoring Indigenous students; creating a supportive community for Indigenous graduate students, and establishing and broadening support networks for all Indigenous students at KU; and engaging with the national SIGP team to support the adoption of best practices for supporting Indigenous students. A central feature of the project is the development of a Sloan Undergraduate Scholars Program via KU’s existing partnership with Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU). This partnership will bolster efforts to connect STEM-specific pathways between HINU and KU and facilitate a near-peer mentoring program, with SIGP scholars at KU serving as mentors to SUSP scholars at HINU.