Responsibly evaluating different paths toward decarbonization of the energy system requires understanding how the benefits and burdens created are distributed across racial, economic, and geographic groups. This grant, led by Catie Hausman at the University of Maryland and Arik Levinson at Georgetown University, funds an initiative by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to stimulate high quality research that examines the distributional equity dimensions of energy decarbonization in the United States.  NBER will hold two broad and open call for new research papers on these topics, one focusing on research examining the distributional effects of new energy technologies and the other focusing on the distributional effects of new energy policies.  The initiative expects to produce a total of 16 original high-quality papers on these topics, and the papers for each call will be shared with other scholars and experts at dissemination workshops.

Negative emissions technologies aim to combat rising atmospheric carbon emissions by capturing and removing carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere and sequestering it safely underground or for reuse. Assessing the potential of these technologies requires insights from the social sciences—including economics, public policy, political science, sociology, and life cycle assessment, among others—on issues like how they might integrate with existing energy systems and how energy consumers and producers would respond to their deployment. Funds from this grant support the creation of a social science research fellowship program across multiple universities that will aim to foster research by young scholars interested in studying negative emissions technologies. Coordinated by Peter Schlosser at Arizona State University, a multidisciplinary committee will review and select four promising postdoctoral researchers for support and embed them for two years at one of a number of partner universities involved in negative emissions social science research.  In addition to salary support for each fellow, grant funds will support networking, learning, and professional development activities for the fellows, including opportunities for fellows to present their research to one another and to other scholars and practitioners in the energy community at large.

Industrial sources account for one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Despite their important contributions to emissions, many industrial sub-sectors—such as cement, iron and steel, chemicals, and construction—are poorly represented in key integrated assessment models that are used to inform decisions about how to decarbonize the economy. In particular, these models do not reflect emerging low-carbon advancements in these sub-sectors that might improve decarbonization rates and affect overall emissions reductions in these sectors. One of the most often used integrated assessment models is GCAM, a popular open source model used by researchers to simulate how various decarbonization approaches and scenarios would affect both the environment and the economy over the long term. The GCAM module that represents industrial decarbonization has not been updated for nearly a decade and currently reflects only minimal information from a small number of industrial sectors and thus fails to capture new low-carbon developments across a range of industries. This grant funds a team of scholars led by Andres Clarens at the University of Virginia and CGAM developers based at the University of Maryland to update critical components of GCAM’s industrial decarbonization module. The focus of this project will be to combine information from high quality data sources, life cycle assessments, and expert elicitations to improve GCAM’s representation of five crucial industrial sectors: cement (one of the largest industries from a decarbonization perspective), chemicals production, construction, nonferrous metals, and mining.  

Founded in 2013 by Jason Bordoff, the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University has quickly become one of the leading academic research centers focused on analyzing all aspects of the U.S. energy system. A first class research institute in its own right, CGEP also excels at bridging the researcher-policymaker divide.  It accessibly condenses and summarizes complicated research, connects research results with their implications for policy, and creates venues to effectively disseminate research to decision-makers, media, and the public.  Funds for this grant support the creation of two additional professional positions at CGEP: a senior research director and a managing editor.  The research director will be responsible for managing all components of research production and will oversee CGEP’s research quality control procedures, including its internal and external review processes. The managing editor’s role will be to assist in the research review process and generate various outputs for dissemination that will help make CGEP’s work more relevant and accessible to decision-makers. Both the research director and managing editor positions are critical in overseeing the variety of research outputs produced by CGEP and will cement CGEP’s central role of bringing high quality, objective research to those stakeholders entrusted to act in the public interest. Grant funds will support these positions for their initial two-year period to help inaugurate these roles.  

Energy economics research can be a starkly solitary endeavor. Training is rarely team-based, leaving energy economics students with little experience working in large groups or across disciplines, even as demand is rising for the sort of interdisciplinary scholarship that can meaningfully addresses complicated questions about the interconnections between energy, the environment, and climate change. The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) has developed a collaboration-oriented, team-based, two-year research experience and training program for predoctoral students—those with undergraduate or Master’s degrees—that looks to engage researchers early in their career and introduce them to a more integrated, interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Selected students work with University of Chicago economics faculty on a wide variety of research projects. In addition to receiving high-quality research experience, predoctoral fellows receive dedicated faculty mentorship, cutting-edge data science training, and networking opportunities. EPIC has designed an extensive orientation program for the fellows, along with a series of professional development activities that provide guidance and assistance to help them determine potential next steps in their careers. Funds from this grant will provide stipend and administrative support for four fellows in the EPIC program over the next two years.

This grant provides funding to extend a project by Laura Dabbish of Carnegie Mellon University to study women’s participation in open source software projects. Combining qualitative interviews with network analysis of large-scale project data from GitHub, Dabbish broadens the definition of “participation” beyond code commits, cataloged the various ways software projects telegraph openness to new contributors, and hypothesized that gendered difference in the social network structures men and women create explain why women on average disengage from open source participation earlier than men. Grant funds will allow Dabbish to expand her work to other open source software ecosystems while also probing the gender dynamics of “maintainers,” those leaders in open source projects responsible for the technical and social “invisible work” that holds a project together. In addition, Dabbish and her partners will pilot an extension of their methods to the study of other underrepresented minorities in open source, starting with the experience of U.S.-born Black women contributors.

Open source software (OSS) is an increasingly vital component of the scientific research enterprise, used in one form or another at every point in the research pipeline, from instrument calibration, to data collection and cleaning, to analysis and visualization, to archiving.  The centrality and importance of OSS has led to the realization within academic institutions of the need for formal mechanisms to identify and support those OSS projects most central to its researchers.  One model being explored is the creation of university Open Source Programs Offices (OSPO), special intra-university bodies charged with the support of important open source software.    This grant funds an innovative OSPO-like effort at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), led by Steven Jacobs.  The initiative, called Open@RIT, helps university researchers secure funding for OSS work, enlists undergraduates to work directly with RIT faculty on OSS projects, collects data on faculty involvement with OSS, and supports the creation of documentation and other resources that are essential to effective OSS projects.  Grant funds will support the salary of an office staff member to provide administrative support as well as funding for a pool of undergraduate students who wish to work on faculty OSS projects. The grant will help the Open@RIT effort grow, build relationships across the university, and publicize dependence of many campus activities on open source software.  The team also plans to develop a playbook for other institutions interested in launching similar efforts on their own campuses.

In early 2020, Carol Tenopir (University of Tennessee) and Dave Nicholas (CIBER) completed a four-year longitudinal study of early career researcher (ECR) practices across the natural and social sciences.  Drawing on more than 350 hours of interviews with 100 early career researchers in China, France, Poland, Malaysia, Spain, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S., the findings ranged from the expected to the surprising: for instance, young researchers were nearly universally indifferent to using altmetrics to measure scholarly impact, and they showed little interest in publishing in Open Access journals, despite widespread dissatisfaction with existing academic regimes of publication and promotion.  Funds from this grant will support the extension of Tenopir and Nicholas’s work, with an emphasis on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the research and communications practices of young researchers around the globe.

The PHD Excellence Initiative (PHDEI) at New York University aims to help undergraduate students of color craft academic records, especially in math and economics, that make them competitive for admission into top economics doctoral programs. Led by of Peter Blair Henry, William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Finance and Dean Emeritus of the NYU Stern School of Business, the PHDEI is an intense, individualized two-year asset-building fellowship with encouraging initial results.  Henry personally trains and mentors every fellow supported by the program, serves as their advocate inside the university, and tailors his efforts to the specific needs of each fellow. The program includes weekly scheduled meetings, research activities, GRE prep strategy, advice on course selection, support ub navigating the graduate school admissions process, and. where possible, the publication of a fellow’s research findings in a peer-reviewed journal.  Initial results have been promising, with five of six fellows securing admission into one of the nation’s top economics graduate programs. Funds from this grant provide partial support for the continuation of PHDEI.  In addition, grant funds will be used to create a mentor training program aimed at helping interested institutions start successful PHDEI programs of their own. 

The Sloan Public Service Awards are an annual awards program that recognizes six outstanding public servants in New York City. Launched by the Fund for the City of New York in 1973, the awards are the only comprehensive attempt to recognize, honor and celebrate the extraordinary contributions of the more than 325,000 people who work in New York City government. Each winner--often a lifetime civil servant who has given decades to the city—receives a $10,000 prize and is celebrated individually at workplace ceremonies and jointly at a gala held in the historic Cooper Union. Funds from this grant support the continuation of the Sloan Public Service Awards for a period of five years.