The Colorado School of Mines, in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has established a new, unique graduate program in Advanced Energy Systems. Working closely with faculty and researchers from both institutions, doctoral students will move seamlessly between Mines and NREL to augment their academic training with hands-on experience, providing a robust, multidisciplinary foundation for understanding and analyzing energy systems. This grant supports this innovative new doctoral program in three ways. First, it will provide two years of salary support for a program director staff position; the program director will be responsible for overseeing program management, student recruitment, external partnerships, and donor outreach. Second, it provides funds for a student-run seminar series that will allow students to bring in external energy experts to enrich the training program. Third, it provides funds for the development and implementation of a summer research program for enrolled doctoral students, helping select students in the Ph.D. program pursue individualized research projects in furtherance of their training and education.

This grant supports an innovative training and professional development program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to give early-career scientists and economists the skills needed to effectively conduct policy-relevant research in an applied setting, outside a college or university. Training covers such topics as communications, proposal writing, program management, and team leadership and features a series of workshops that separately target postbaccalaureates and postdoctoral researchers to reflect the different skill development needs of these two groups.   Funds from this grant will allow EDF to enhance and expand this program. Formerly focused on training EDF’s in-house junior scientists, the program will expand through a series of institutional partnerships to include other early-career researchers at other universities and NGOs. The curriculum will also expand to include a series of monthly in-person or virtual workshops on relevant topics, including data science and empirical research methods. Additional funds support efforts to track and evaluate the impact of the program, to place trained scientists in policy-relevant positions at NGOs or in government, and to distill and disseminate lessons learned to those institutions interested in starting similar programs. EDF plans to integrate aspects of this program into its standard professional development activities by the conclusion of this grant.

Most home heating systems involve burning natural gas or oil. However, a less carbon-intensive technology is becoming more readily available: electric heat pumps. Heat pumps can provide heating services through interchanges with the ambient air or from the ground. Heat pumps have become increasingly more efficient than conventional oil or gas systems, with the potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This grant funds a multi-institutional project led by economist Yueming Lucy Qiu at the University of Maryland, College Park, engineer Parth Vaishnav at Carnegie Mellon University, and economist Pengfei Liu at the University of Rhode Island that will examine the economic and engineering tradeoffs associated with heat pump installation. Qiu and her team have procured access to a detailed dataset drawn from Zillow, the popular real estate website, that contains records on nearly four million homes with heat pumps installed, the most extensive dataset on heat pumps that is readily available. Analyzing the Zillow data, Qiu and her team will examine how heat pump installation impacts home property values and how federal, state, and local incentive policies impact consumer decisions to install heat pumps. The team plans to produce a number of academic articles on these topics for both social science and engineering journals, and the dataset will be made available for other scholars for their own analyses.