This grant supports the production of Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda, a weekly podcast where the internationally acclaimed actor and science communicator interviews the nation’s leading intellectuals, scientists, artists, advocates, and thinkers.  Grant funds will support seven episodes of Clear+Vivid, now in its 14th season, to allow Alda to conduct interviews with scientists on a range of interesting and socially relevant topics, including AI, social cognition, brain trauma, robotics, neuroscience, psychiatry and optogenetics, philosophy in science, and forgetfulness. Episodes will be released through major podcasting platforms, on Clear+Vivid’s feed, and will be promoted by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, the nation’s leading science communication research, training, and education organization. The episodes will be released in late 2021 and early 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many technological shifts that have already been taking place, including the shift from in-person to online and hybrid (in-person and online) academic gatherings. Eliminating the need for travel reduces environmental impacts and the burden imposed on delegates, and videotelephony services have demonstrated that they can meet the basic needs required to bring a gathering online. But while videotelephony can handle presentations and Q&A sessions, it cannot recreate the serendipitous hallway conversations that can lead to new scientific collaborations, ideas, and discoveries.   This grant supports an investigation by Roger Schonfeld at Ithaka Harbors, doing business as Ithaka S+R, into the opportunities and drawbacks of online and hybrid academic gatherings. Schonfeld and his team will use a combination of research, interviews, and design thinking—a human-centered approach to innovation—to help approximately 15 academic societies plan better academic gatherings that are informed by what works well in online and hybrid gatherings. The team’s project will elucidate the new skills and technologies needed to foster the interactions that were easy to create with in-person gatherings, which they will then share with decision-makers to enable more sustainable, inclusive, and engaging options for scholarly communication.

This grant supports research by Philip Guo, cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego who is exploring questions around the cultural and communications gaps which occur between domain researchers and the computational staff in their employ. Questions Guo is investigating include how interpersonal power dynamics affect collaboration on research projects and how might these dynamics be addressed in order to better build and maintain open source software. Grant funds will allow Guo’s lab to employ a graduate student to assist with these research efforts.

The American Educational Research Association, in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, EducationCounsel, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Civil Rights Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Law, is undertaking a comprehensive research project to synthesize a large multidisciplinary body of knowledge aimed at documenting and quantifying the multiple ways that various forms of structural and systemic racism harm individual students and their educational outcomes. The project team will look at four broad areas of scholarship: physiology, biology, and genomics; mental health; identity science (which includes the study of phenomena like stereotype threat and microaggressions); and educational access, infrastructure, and pedagogy.  Though each of these fields has well-documented findings on the individualized impacts of racism on student outcomes, no attempt has been made to provide a synthesis that brings this diverse body of findings into a comprehensive whole. The proposed synthesis promises to provide a vital evidence-based resource that can inform discussion among educators, policymakers, courts, and the public about what scientific consensus has to say about the individual discrimination-based harms suffered by students and how to tailor fair and equitable college admissions and other educational policies in ways that are both cognizant of and responsive to these harms.

The Tor Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds and maintains a technology called Tor, which allows internet users to safeguard their online communication by routing  traffic through sets of distributed relays in ways that protect the identity of both the sender and receiver. The technology, most commonly used in a browser app (Tor Browser), relies on a network of over 6,000 volunteer-run relays, and Tor is investing in tooling and community outreach to shore up this key piece of internet infrastructure. This grant partially supports Tor’s strategic foci for the coming year: investment in the relay network, a re-implementation of the network in the open-source Rust language, user training and support, and general data collection on network-level internet censorship.  

Transportation is one of the primary contributors to U.S. carbon emissions, which is why encouraging drivers to switch to electric vehicles (EVs) is an important part of lowering those emissions. Financial incentives, like subsidies or tax rebates, have been shown to be effective at improving adoption of electric vehicles, but many incentive designs are economically inefficient and primarily benefit high-income drivers. Tax credits, for instance, benefit those who can afford the full up-front purchase price of an EV and are able to wait for the credit to arrive later at the end of the tax year. Moreover, available data on the effectiveness of incentive programs are largely historical, meaning they are predominantly based on the behavior of early adopters, who tend to be both whiter and wealthier than the population as a whole. This grant supports work by John Helveston of George Washington University who will field a survey that will measure consumer preferences for different EV financial incentive features to gain insight from a more diverse population than is reflected in currently available data. The survey will ask respondents to choose among different alternative options that can be used to encourage EV adoption. In this case, the survey will ask about different incentive design features, such as the amount of the incentive, how it is provided (for instance, as a sales tax exemption, tax credit, deduction, or rebate), who is providing it (such as a government entity or car dealer), and when it is provided (such as at the time of sale or during annual tax filing). The survey will be distributed to at least 2,000 U.S. vehicle buyers of varying age, income, and race via an online platform. It will also collect other relevant data, such as the size of the car that the respondent plans on purchasing or whether they are looking to purchase a new or used vehicle. The resulting data, which will be among the most detailed of its kind, will be used to analyze how alternative incentive design features (or combinations of features) might differentially affect consumer behavior across different demographic groups.

This grant supports the launch of new a mentoring program at the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE), a leading professional society, to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in energy and environmental economics. Led by Jill Caviglia-Harris at Salisbury University, the AERE Scholars Program will engage a diverse set of scholars interested in a broad range of research questions, support early-career energy and environmental economists as they move through their career, and create a more inclusive culture for scholars from historically underrepresented groups. The year-long program pairs early-career faculty with more established mentors in the field and also involves peer-mentoring activities. This mentorship program will culminate in a workshop at the end of the year. AERE has selected 20 mentee-mentor pairs for its inaugural group and plans to recruit 10 mentee-mentor pairs in future years.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is the White House Department tasked with coordinating efforts across the federal government to develop and implement sound science and technology policy, evaluating the effectiveness of federal scientific research budgets and programs, and advising the President on scientific, engineering, and technological aspects of executive governance. Energy and environmental topics are playing an increasingly important role in OSTP’s work, with a consequent need for high quality scientific expertise to help inform policy advisory activities.  This grant supports an expansion of the Day One Project, an initiative by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) that works with government agencies to identify the scientific and technical expertise needed to effectively fulfill their functions, to bring energy and environment expertise into OSTP.   Grant funds will enable an expansion of the Day One Impact Fellows program, allowing FAS to recruit a scholar with expertise on energy and environmental topics and place this individual within OSTP for a one-year fellowship, giving OSTP access to the impartial scholarly expertise needed to effectively fill its advisory functions. This grant also provides resources to develop a stronger cohort network of Impact Fellows working on energy and environment issues in different agencies.

Many low carbon technologies require the use and deployment of relatively rare metals and minerals in their manufacturing and construction. For instance, next generation batteries require lithium, cobalt, and nickel. High-efficiency motors utilize neodymium and dysprosium.  Platinum and platinum-like elements are essential for new fuel cells and in many other clean manufacturing processes.  As the economy decarbonizes, demand for these elements will rise and with that rise in demand raises a number of economic, policy, and environmental issues, such as how supply chain bottlenecks might raise prices for these rare metals and minerals, how they might be reused or recycled, and whether they will be disposed of responsibly. This grant supports a project by Morgan Bazilian of the Colorado School of Mines that will attempt to address critical gaps in our knowledge in this area. Grant funds will allow Bazilian to improve, upgrade and expand an empirically-informed model he has created of the metal and mineral needs of a wide range of clean energy technologies. Drawing both on industry sources and on published work by researchers, the model will eventually cover 25 technology areas and 55 distinct metals and minerals.  Bazilian will then use the improved model to conduct an analysis of critical metal and mineral demand and re-use scenarios under a range of different assumptions about growth rates, supply constraints, and recycling options. The project will pay particular attention to the prospects for recycling previously used critical metals and minerals so they can be re-utilized in the clean energy sector.  The analysis will produce a more robust picture than ever before about how different scenarios of clean energy growth will affect demand for, and productive lifecycle of, critical metals and minerals.

The Center for Diverse Leadership in Science (CDLS) at UCLA is the nation’s first university center focusing on diversity in the environmental sciences. Founded in 2017, CDLS aims to create opportunities for underrepresented people to gain education and experience that equips them with leadership skills and to serve as a model of diversity and inclusion across the nation. This grant supports the center’s director, Aradhna Tripati, in expanding two of CDLS’ main objectives—partnering with Minority Serving Institutions to widen pathways to STEM education and organizing a fellowship program that trains future decision-makers working across a variety of academic fields. Grant funds will allow CDLS to further its leadership development program, strengthen relationships with its institutional partners, and develop its strategic, communications, and outreach activities.