This grant supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) new podcast series, How to Fix the Internet, which explores the challenges posed by big tech and what consumers can do to protect themselves and their privacy and security. EFF is an international digital rights group focusing on technical tools, litigation, and public education. Over the course of two seasons of ten one-hour episodes, its new podcast will give listeners an awareness of and appreciation for the technologies that surround us every day, the policies and choices embedded in those technologies, and the role of corporations and laws in steering our digital world—allowing people to make more informed choices as they gain a deeper understanding of new technologies.

This grant provides three years of renewed support to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), for a series of activities, programs, and initiatives designed to encourage UCLA film students to engage with scientific and technological themes in their filmmaking and to produce science-themed films and screenplays. UCLA’s Sloan Foundation-supported activities include four annual prizes: a $30,000 production award; two $15,000 screenwriting awards; and a $15,000 episodic television award, as well as an annual colloquium that brings film students together with leading researchers to discuss the newest developments in science and technology. This grant also provides funds for dedicated scientific advisors to help students with their projects, independent judges to evaluate student submission, and faculty support and other operational costs associated with administration of the program.

This grant provides three years of continued support to the American Film Institute’s (AFI) efforts to encourage young screenwriters and filmmakers to write and produce compelling narrative films that explore scientific themes or have scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. AFI’s Sloan Foundation-supported activities include four annual prizes: a $25,000 production award; a $20,000 annual screenwriting award; a $25,000 development award; and a $45,000 tuition award. In addition, AFI holds a seminar series where established actors, writers, directors, and producers talk to students about science and Hollywood, and provides access to working scientists to serve as mentors on student scripts.

There are many complex societal questions associated with the development and deployment of negative emissions technologies, which are designed to remove carbon dioxide from the air, and solar radiation management technologies, which attempt to reflect sunlight from the atmosphere and thereby reduce warming. These include, but are not limited to, issues related to public perception and acceptance, willingness to site such novel technological infrastructure in different communities, and analyzing how costs and benefits might accrue differentially across populations. This grant will support high-quality social science research to understand community stakeholder views on negative emissions and solar radiation management in different regions of the country. Researchers will conduct interviews and focus groups across five geographically diverse regions where negative emissions or solar radiation interventions are likely to be located.  The multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research team, led by Holly Buck at the University of Buffalo, will supplement the local perspectives garnered through these interviews by fielding a nationally representative survey to examine public perceptions of both technologies and provide baseline information across a wide cross-section of the population. The team expects to produce up to six research papers that report on their results, train at least one postdoctoral scholar, and disseminate findings to practitioners and local communities.

The Clean Energy Program at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is one of the leading research efforts examining the energy innovation ecosystem in the United States. This grant, led by energy policy scholar David Hart, funds two projects at ITIF—one training, one research. The training project involves organizing a week-long energy innovation policy “boot camp” in 2022 in Washington, D.C. that will involve a cohort of approximately 20 early-career social scientists.  Participating researchers will be introduced to the practicalities of how energy policy is made and will encourage them to highlight the potential connections between research and decision-making in their own work. The second project involves advancing a collaborative research effort that ITIF is undertaking with scholars at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy (BU-ISE) and the BU-based Fraunhofer USA Center for Manufacturing Innovation (CMI) to examine the decarbonization potential of two industrial subsectors.  Researchers will conduct technical, economic, and policy analysis for each chosen subsector, and they will collect data and conduct interviews with industry and regulatory stakeholders that explore relevant energy innovation policy issues, such as financial incentive structures, global competitiveness, and innovation diffusion patterns. The research is expected to result in at least two reports and academic papers, and it will form the basis of a number of policy briefs that the team will provide to industry and governmental stakeholders.

Digital technology developments—including new technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things, and behavioral shifts like the rise in digital platform use—can have profound implications for energy and the environment. In 2018, the Foundation supported an emerging effort to study these impacts, and this grant supports the continuation and expansion of this network. Led by Reid Lifset at Yale University, Jordan Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kasantha Moodley and Dave Rejeski at the Environmental Law Institute, this research network is now known as the Network for Digital Economy and Environment (nDEE). Having already explored the direct effects of digital technologies on energy and the environment, they will now conduct research projects to explore the indirect effects of these digital technologies on energy systems. Three specific research projects will be supported at the outset, with a process designed to further source additional research ideas. The first project will study how the rise of short-term rental services like Airbnb is impacting carbon emissions. The direct effects on emissions through, say, increasing tourism, are well documented, but there are also indirect effects to consider, such as increased travel from Airbnb locations that may be located at the outskirt of cities, thereby increasing overall emissions. The second project will look at the energy implications of product returns. Many product life-cycle analysis calculations stop short of assessing what happens when a product is returned to the seller, and this analysis does not continue to follow a returned product’s continuing environmental impact beyond that point. The third project will seek to design improved personal environmental footprint calculators that integrate robust privacy preserving features. While exploring indirect effects is more challenging than exploring direct effects, completing this work will improve our understanding of how the digital economy contributes to global carbon emissions and what steps we might take toward reducing its impact.

Today’s energy, environmental, and natural resource challenges require rigorous and independent research and analysis to inform the design of effective policies. This grant supports Resources for the Future (RFF) in co-organizing Energy Insights 2022, a conference that will emphasize the connection between energy research and policy decision-making, in partnership with the Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program. Following a successful collaboration in organizing the Energy Research Insights for Decisionmaking conference in 2018, this event will feature a range of Sloan-funded energy-related research exploring key issue areas including new technologies, transportation, energy infrastructure resiliency, and distributional equity and environmental justice. By drawing on Sloan’s grantee network and RFF’s connections to policy audiences, the private sector, and the wider research community, Energy Insights 2022 aims to build and strengthen networking opportunities among energy and environment researchers and connect their research to decision-makers.

Though industrial processes present many opportunities for decarbonization, realizing these opportunities has historically been challenging. Many sectors—including manufacturing, construction, and chemicals production—have, until recently, simply lacked low-carbon alternatives to current practices. Scholarly work is made more difficult by the lack of interdisciplinary knowledge and connections to networks needed to understand the complex interplay of technology, market structure, supply chains, and industrial organization in any sector. Andre Taylor at New York University is creating a new multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research effort addressing an important aspect of industrial decarbonization: chemical production. Working with Elizabeth Biddinger at the City College of New York, Taylor will establish a Center for Decarbonizing Chemical Manufacturing Using Sustainable Electrification (called DC-MUSE) and has assembled a team of scholars spanning chemical engineering, materials science, modeling, computation, and economic analysis across seven universities. The initial research focus will be decarbonizing ethylene manufacturing, which currently requires burning large amounts of fossil fuels to achieve the high input heat necessary for the chemical reactions that produce ethylene. Ethylene is an important initial target because it is a key ingredient in manufacturing, including in plastics, textiles, and other synthetic materials. The team will explore two alternative processes for generating ethylene that do not require high input heat (and, therefore, burning fossil fuels), then use this information to understand how low-carbon chemical plants might integrate with the grid. This grant will support a manager role for the center who will help coordinate activities among the network and build connections with stakeholders in government and industry.

In 2018, the Foundation supported the launch of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy (EEPE) initiative. This initiative aims to encourage energy economists to produce policy-relevant research that is more directed at decision-makers than traditional scholarly work in the field. EEPE is led by Matt Kotchen at Yale University, along with steering community members Tatyana Deryugina at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and Jim Stock at Harvard University. Having been successful in its first few years, the EEPE initiative has been renewed for three years and is expanding to include a postdoctoral fellowship. Research will be presented at an annual conference and published in a volume by the University of Chicago Press. Many of the intended topics of study have an equity dimension, while future topics will include a number with an explicit focus on environmental justice. The grant will also provide funding for an early-career scholar to conduct policy-relevant research, helping to solidify the link between EEPE and policy decision-makers. The scholar will receive mentoring from staff at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s National Center for Environmental Economics, an office that performs economic analysis to inform EPA decision-making.

Compartments, i.e., discrete spatial regions, are important to life. Cells use them to store molecules for later use and to promote biochemistry by keeping molecules close to one another. Life typically compartmentalizes via walls built from lipid membranes, but biologists have discovered that life also employs a membrane-free approach to compartmentalization. Rather than relying on a wall to demarcate what's inside vs outside of a compartment, life can instead employ phase-transitions, changes in the state of matter (e.g., liquid or solid), to segregate molecules. Envision a gel-like region of closely interacting chemicals within a large liquid-like region of a cell. These phase-change compartments are called biomolecular condensates. They are ubiquitous in living systems and important to cellular function. Condensates have been identified that sequester damaged proteins and orchestrate chromosome separation during cell division, and they've also been implicated in human diseases such as Alzheimer’s. This grant funds work by a team led by Rebecca Shulman at Johns Hopkins University who are attempting to understand and ultimately control condensates as a step towards an improved understanding of compartmentalization that could shed light on the matter-to-life transition. Condensates appear well-positioned for this purpose. On the one hand they share many core functions with cells. Condensates naturally form, grow, dissolve, fuse, and divide. On the other, they are vastly simpler, biomechanically, than cells themselves, allowing researchers to investigate these core activities without the complicating internal structure present in natural cells. The work will focus on nucleic acid-based condensates, condensates where the nucleic acid polymers DNA and RNA are the functional elements that condense or otherwise control the phase transition between a condensate and its exterior. The team's approach is to design, build, and characterize nucleic acid condensates. They'll design synthetic DNA templates that produce RNA molecules with the capacity for spontaneous phase separation, testing hypotheses about how aspects of polymer design influence the condensation process. They'll use optical microscopes and other tools to achieve high-throughput characterization that leads to phase diagrams that summarize condensate properties under varying conditions (temperature, different condensing macromolecules, various solution-phase buffer-molecules). They'll also develop molecular signals that cause distinct condensates to mix or demix with one another, or which cause one type of condensate to expel molecules that signal another condensate to perform some function. These studies will provide insights into how condensates can be used to transport "cargo," chemicals that are not essential to the condensation itself but are instead stored or transported by the condensate. If successful, the project could form the foundation of a new discipline of condensate engineering, one that could open new routes to chemical synthesis, advance our understanding of natural cells, lead to new types of intracellular organelles, and provide insights into how matter transitions to life.