Climate change is already affecting how energy systems function, with higher temperatures and more intense storms making energy systems more vulnerable overall, leading to a rise in the number of power outages in recent decades. This is evident in numerous recent events, from hurricanes destroying power generation systems in Puerto Rico to California wildfires disrupting transmission lines to the February 2021 Texas blackout caused by extreme cold. This grant funds a multi-institutional research effort led by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), in partnership with researchers at the University of Houston and Lehigh University, to begin advancing our understanding of how extreme weather events might impact the U.S. energy system. It will examine ERCOT, the Texas electricity grid, and researchers on this project will create an integrated modeling framework, called Pythias, that links together components of five separate models covering separate aspects of energy and climate systems: a power grid management model, a regional climate model, a regional water use and hydrology model, the open source GCAM model that links energy and climate change to socioeconomic factors, and an agent-based decision model to help game out how planners and other stakeholders might respond to changes in energy systems. The team will then use Pythias to model how ERCOT grid might respond to various plausible climate scenarios that could arise in the future.

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies (CCUS) aim to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) when it is generated and before the CO2 is released into the atmosphere.  The captured CO2 is subsequently stored or re-used in ways that do not involve putting it back in the air. CCUS technologies seem promising in theory, but uptake has been sluggish due to a variety of factors, including high upfront costs, poorly developed markets for captured CO2, and policies that provide inadequate incentives for adoption. This grant funds a multidisciplinary team of scholars, led by Sheila Olmstead, from the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Wyoming to launch four studies designed to address a range of issues related to CCUS. In the first, the project team will analyze and compare various policy interventions aimed at mitigating the high up-front costs of installing CCUS systems. In the second, the team will identify and analyze the frictions that inhibit coordination between power plant owners, pipeline developers, geologic storage managers, and CO2 utilization customers, and it will analyze the costs and benefits of different policies to ease those frictions. Third, the team will examine current tax policies designed to incentivize CCUS update and compare their efficacy to other possible policies, like a carbon tax or emissions standards. Fourth, the team will model the potential impacts of increased adoption of CCUS across different regions, with a particular focus on the effects on underrepresented and marginalized populations. In addition to their own research, the UT Austin and University of Wyoming teams will use grant funds to spur further research on these topics by holding an open call for projects to be undertaken by scholars at other institutions that will be supported through a small sub-award program. A final workshop will be held for all scholars involved over the course of the project to share methods and findings.

This grant supports efforts by the University of California, Berkeley’s Initiative on Equity in Energy and Enviromental Economics, to attract a more diverse group of students to the study of energy economics, and to provide education and training that will prepare these students for success in graduate study and careers in professional energy economics.  Funded activities include a mentoring program for underrepresented graduate students of color, a competitive grant program that will fund ten graduate research projects on issues related to energy equity, and an initiative to hire an underrepresented postdoctoral scholar of color working in energy economics.  Additional grant fund will support a series of networking and convening events to build community across all levels of this initiative to connect supported students to one another and with energy economics faculty at Energy Institute at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business—one of the leading energy economics centers in the country—and Berkeley’s Opportunity Lab.

The review process for software is analogous to but in some ways different from a manuscript review; in addition to assessing the integrity of the methods manifested in the software’s algorithms, reviewers can consider features of the code itself and how well it is “bundled” for use by others. Does it run well under varying conditions? How interoperable is it with other platforms? What is the quality of its documentation? Such review is important for two main reasons. First, software that receives high marks by reputable reviewers lowers barriers to use.  Scientists can trust that well-reviewed code is robust, trustworthy, and easy to implement, even if they did not write the code themselves.  Second, well-regarded software reviews (and citations) can signal value and thus increase the incentives for software engineers and others to develop and maintain research software.  This grant funds a project by ecologist and data scientist Leah Wasser to further advance research software review in Python, arguably the dominant programming language for data science. pyOpenSci will mimic many of the core functions of the rOpenSci ecosystem including a grassroots process to develop common community standards, a transparent review process that leverages critical tooling from the Journal of Open Source Software, and efforts to build a strong, well-connected, diverse network of developers, engineers, and working scientists committed to the project.

One of the promises of digital information technology is fast and frictionless communication.  Powered by data sharing and collaboration platforms, the vision of the 21st century knowledge economy is one where a lab in Johannesburg can partner with one in Jaipur, with corresponding increases in global productivity and decreases in unnecessary, duplicative work.  In practice, frictions continue to exist that impede the flow of knowledge across national and platform borders. This grant funds efforts by political scientist Margaret Roberts and economist Ruixue Jia at the University of California San Diego to study how policies that sever transnational exchange and flows of information goods impact collaboration, scientific progress, and innovation.  Roberts and Jia will study the impacts of impediments to information sharing and their impacts on collaboration, including censorship of knowledge-sharing and collaboration platforms, the launch of substitutes to these platforms, and policies that discourage international collaboration. Using a rich multi-method approach that involves observational study, analysis of natural experiments, original field experiments, and interviews with scientists, the team will examine how platforms for collaboration and their breakdown has affected citation, information sharing, and innovation rates.

The University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) program is a series of three-year grants to eight universities around the country that are working to transform graduate education to better serve Black, LatinX, and Indigenous 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 but interrelated set of resources designed to create an inclusive, connected, and supportive educational environment conducive to successful doctoral completion and subsequent career success.  These include faculty and peer mentoring, networking events, professional development seminars and resources, access to resilience counseling, a five-week research immersion program for incoming graduate students, and much more.   This grant provides three years of continued support to the UCEM housed at Duke University.  In addition to continuing its prior activities, the Duke UCEM team plans to implement new initiatives over the three year grant term to bring more academic departments at Duke into the UCEM and to further institutionalize the center’s recruitment and support activities as core functions at the university. The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering acts as the Foundation’s partner and fiscal steward for the program: verifying student eligibility, administering stipends, and collecting and tracking data on UCEM expenditures and outcomes.

Natural cells routinely use shape as a vector for acquiring and disseminating information about their environment.  Detecting the shape of a cell they have encountered can impart important information about their neighbor, and thus inform what sort of response would be most adaptive.  The underlying mechanisms that allow organisms to process this topological information, however, are not well understood.  This grant funds a multi-disciplinary a team led by Ronit Freeman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to better understand these mechanisms by attempting to create an artificial cell-like entity that mimics natural cells’ ability to detect shape.  Grant funds will support three interrelated research efforts. We know that cells use proteins to detect the shape of fellow cells, but the proteins that perform this function can be 10 to 100 times smaller than the cells they are measuring.  How these natural systems bridge that length gap is poorly understood.  Using advanced atomic scale microscopy, Freeman’s team will observe the behavior and structure of these shape-detecting proteins and attempt to reverse engineer synthetic versions that could perform similar functions in a synthetic cell. A second effort will focus on signal transduction, the process of converting shape data collected at the cell membrane into physical and biochemical signals that can be passed to a cell’s interior.  The research team will attempt to create synthetic pathways that mimic signal transduction mechanisms thought to operate in natural cells, allowing them to use detected topological information to effect changes in behavior of the synthetic cell itself.  Third, the team will use advanced techniques to model how topological information can spread through communities of cells, affecting the behavior or characteristics of entire cell collectives.  Such modeling has, to date, mainly confined itself to the chemical aspects of cellular communication. Freeman and her team will expand these efforts, incorporating physical variables such as the flow of mass and momentum, membrane elasticity, flow across interfaces, and cell deformation into their model.

A Cornell University team led by Paul McEuen has developed a fully artificial platform with some remarkable capabilities.  The platform's basic building blocks—magnetic digital polymers—are small panels (a few microns) with magnetic data lithographically patterned on their faces and sides. These data specify via magnetic forces how the panels interact with one another.  This ingeniously allows the panels to mimic the chemistry of biological molecules.  In biological molecules, the atoms that make up a molecule determine which other molecules it can chemically bond with and how strong such a bond, once formed, is.  By altering the data pattered on the faces of the digital polymers, McEuen and his team can replicate these features, with some polymers bonding selectively with others, just like biological molecules do.  What’s more, because the physics of magnetism is well-understood, the behavior of McEuen’s magnetic polymers should be relatively simply, at least in theory, to model and predict. This grant funds an effort by McEuen and his research team to attempt to use magnetic digital polymers to mimic two important features of biological life: reproduction and metabolism. To demonstrate "reproduction" McEuen and his team will begin by developing what they call Magnetic DNA, a digital magnetic polymer capable of replicating itself. Reproduction will be demonstrated by programming in appropriate magnetic interactions to create information strands (polymer patterns) that self-replicate under cyclic application of “agitation” via an external magnetic field, acoustic waves, and/or thermal excitation. To demonstrate "metabolism," the team will use a variety of strategies to create a magnetic polymer version of an enzyme, an entity that can modify the replicating unit. This will involve using magnetic and mechanical forces to cut linear polymer chains at specified locations, in analogy to how the CRISPER-Cas9 protein cuts DNA.

Speculation about the existence of other life in the universe has become invigorated in recent decades by an explosion in the discovery of extrasolar planets.  The numbers tell the story. There were about 50 known exoplanets in year 2000, about 500 known by 2010, and we're approaching 5,000 today.  Powerful telescopes can reveal information about the chemical composition of the atmospheres of these far away planets.  Can they also tell us if there is life there?  They could if the atmospheres of planets with biospheres differed systematically from the atmospheres of lifeless planets, Knowing that, however, would require knowing what the atmosphere of a lifeless planet looks like, and how life might change it. This grant funds an effort led by Anan Shahar at the Carnegie Institution for Science to determine the abiotic atmospheric baseline of the most common planets in our galaxy, sub-Neptune and rocky planets. With the abiotic baseline known, scientists can then consider how Earth-like life might change a planet's atmosphere and in this way tackle the question of whether or not it's possible to determine signatures of life by studying exoplanet atmospheres The research team will pursue an interdisciplinary, holistic approach that combines solid-planet expertise with atmospheric expertise in order to understand the baseline abiotic atmosphere of a planet and how it evolves over the planetary lifecycle.  What’s called a planet’s primary atmosphere is formed early in a planet’s  formation, as the planet coalesces from matter orbiting a local star.  This atmosphere then evolves into a secondary atmosphere, one shaped both by geologic processes on the planet itself (volcanism, magma oceans, outgassing, the weathering of the planet’s surface) and by external forces like comet impacts.  The research team will attempt to model and the analyze the effects of these forces, shedding light on how the atmospheres on lifeless planets are likely to evolve across the planetary lifecycle.