The Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) is a global collaboration that enables, supports, undertakes, and disseminates experimental research about the design of programs and institutions for promoting economic growth through innovation. Since 2014, IGL has launched more than 70 field experiments in 28 countries with the cooperation of more than 35 government agencies. Rigorous findings so far concern everything from the effectiveness of “innovation vouchers” for small and medium businesses to the importance of role models in promoting diversity among entrepreneurs. In the U.S., partners like the Economic Development Administration, Small Business Administration, and NASA have begun working with IGL to meet their obligations under the bipartisan Foundations of Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018.Over the next three years, IGL’s new initiatives will both strengthening such connections in the United States specifically, as well as providing even more services and activities to support the global community of experimentalists studying science, innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. A major IGL undertaking will be to take over the organization of the Conference on Field Experiments in Strategy (CFXS), an annual and significant conference that attracts more than 350 leading scholars from all over the world.Plans include the addition of special workshops and seed grants for the many PhD candidates and early career scholars who attend CFXS in search of help with conducting their first field experiments. Randomized Controlled Trials can be particularly challenging to design and administer. Because they are often large-scale, time consuming, and expensive, too, nobody wants to discover in the middle of running such an experiment that they forgot about some crucial consideration or variable. That is one of the reasons why the work of organizations like IGL is so valuable.

This grant is supports the core operations of an emerging interdisciplinary energy research hub in the Environmental Markets Lab, also known as emLab, based in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). This grant will help to advance emLab’s core activities in both project management and research capacities. Part of the funding will go towards hiring a new energy and climate project manager and helping existing staff to refresh and formalize emLab’s suite of project management tools. Lessons learned from implementing these project management activities will be disseminated throughout the research community. Funding will also support two emLab research projects on energy and distributional equity and is being conducted in partnership with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The first research project focuses on the unequal distribution of energy burdens in California. The intention is to assess differences among household energy expenditures along socio-demographic dimensions. The second project takes a broader, national view and explores the equity implications of electricity sector decarbonization. It will do so by identifying and analyzing regional pollution concentrations due to different forms of electricity production. Researchers will then assess differences in emissions and pollution associated with a range of alternative energy system decarbonization policies. Each research project is expected to result in at least one publication.

This funding supports the administration of a series of small grants emerging from a new Scialog conference series, conducted in partnership with the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). Scialog conferences bring together early-career faculty from different disciplines to develop cutting-edge ideas for research projects that have the potential to grow and expand over time, with discussions guided by senior subject matter experts. This conference series is titled Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials (SM3), and will address issues such as the role of critical minerals and metals in the clean energy transition, synthetic material production, waste disposal and recycling, and life-cycle analysis. The SM3 Scialog series is expected to run for three years, with meetings planned for 2024-2026, and will involve collaboration with other funders as well. At each Scialog conference, participants form collaborative teams and prepare brief proposals for seed grant funding, which are subsequently reviewed by senior researchers and a handful selected for support. This grant will support 10 awards to SM3 Scialog Fellows resulting from the 2024 conference, with each Fellow receiving $66,000 to support their project.

Global factors play a major role in influencing which decarbonization policies are considered by US policymakers and how those policies are implemented. The last few years have seen a host of issues emerge on this front: the push for greater economic protectionism, wars and conflicts that have destabilized energy markets, and the growing recognition that the impacts from climate change will impact economic growth patterns for decades to come. These matters are highly timely and relevant for contemporary energy policymaking in the United States, and have spurred discussion, for example, of establishing a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that would tax carbon-intensive goods entering the country or exploring how recent turbulence in oil and gas markets might influence investment in clean energy technologies. Funds from this grant support efforts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to advance research on the interplay between energy system decarbonization, international trade, and macroeconomics. NBER will hold two open calls for papers on these topics: one in 2024 on energy and trade, and one in 2025 on energy and macroeconomics. Eight research papers are expected to be supported per call, for a total of sixteen. In addition to the calls, grant funds will support two conferences for each call, a pre-conference to share initial ideas, methodologies, and research design, and a second conference to share results and findings with scholars and policymakers. Participating faculty will be asked to nominate graduate students to participate in the conferences, as a way to more closely connect these early-career researchers with NBER.

Sustainable hydrogen has emerged in recent years as a promising contributor in clean energy transitions for its potential to help decarbonize multiple sectors. Scholars are increasingly envisioning numerous uses for cleanly-produced hydrogen, including industrial heat, energy storage, or grid-balancing demand response. Recent work, however, has indicated that hydrogen might itself be an indirect greenhouse gas, with hydrogen emissions potentially increasing warming and therefore offsetting its expected climate benefits. As we begin a national build out of clean hydrogen infrastructure, it is vital to understand potential sources and magnitudes of hydrogen emissions along the supply chain so we can prepare for and address these issues at the outset, instead of having to mitigating these impacts through retrofits down the line. This grant funds the preliminary stages of a major research project by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to conduct a multi-sector, collaborative hydrogen emissions field measurement campaign to better quantify hydrogen emissions across the full hydrogen value chain. Led by Ramón Alvarez, Associate Chief Scientist at EDF, and working closely with partners at West Virginia University and Transport Energy Strategies, EDF will collect hydrogen emissions data from real-world hydrogen fueling stations, including both gaseous and liquid fueling infrastructure, and vehicles, focusing primarily on heavy-duty vehicles like trucks, buses, and forklifts. The team will deploy two new measurement devices, a hydrogen full-flow sampling system, to be used for hydrogen emissions measurement at fueling stations, and the hydrogen portable emissions measurement system, to be used for vehicle emissions testing. These measurement devices will integrate a fine-resolution hydrogen sensor that will allow the project team to measure hydrogen emissions at concentrations that are too low to be a safety concern—and thus are below the measurement threshold of existing sensors—but that, collectively, might aggregate to have climate impacts. The team will use their results to develop some of the first estimates of hydrogen emissions in the transportation sector. In addition to publishing their findings in scholarly journals, EDF will release a publicly available hydrogen emission inventory, which will include the team’s field campaign results and will continue to be expanded as EDF’s larger hydrogen campaign progresses and expands.

Milo Lin, a physicist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, has developed a "mapping” that, when combined with thermodynamic circuit theory, allows one to transform a biochemical network into an equivalent electrical circuit that obeys Ohm’s law. This allows the theorems and powerful quantitative methods of electrical-network-analysis developed over the past century to be applied to biochemical networks. These electrical engineering tools have -for the electronics industry- enabled large-scale system prediction and design through abstraction and modularity as opposed to simulation of all the components and interactions in a given system. Funds from this grant support efforts by Professor Lin to deploy this framework in the analysis of biochemical systems. Lin will begin by systematically mapping a wide variety of biochemical networks found in organisms (regulatory networks, metabolic pathways, molecular motors, etc.) to equivalent electric circuits and then using electrical engineering tools to obtain the simplest circuit of that type. He will then use computer simulations to “evolve” this simple circuit to meet various targets, including determining circuits necessary and sufficient to execute arbitrary computations, circuits that exhibit robustness to input noise, and circuits that exhibit robustness to changes in the fitness landscape.  Lin will then explore the possible existence of a threshold thermodynamic force above which biomolecular computational capacity is dramatically increased, which, if there is a such a threshold, may shed some light on the puzzling observation that living systems overwhelmingly choose nonequilibrium over equilibrium chemistry for computation. If successful, Lin’s project will facilitate our understanding of complex biochemical networks and therefore of how organisms use chemistry to achieve life-sustaining functions. More speculatively, characterizing the computational capacity of a wide range of biochemical networks may provide insights that allow one to delineate living from nonliving matter.

This grant supports research by Chunte (Sam) Peng, an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute, which will focus on creating novel probes for single particle tracking to quantitatively study the nonequilibrium dynamics of molecular motors in vivo, using these dynamics as a window into the functioning of living systems and far-from-equilibrium physics. Professor Peng proposes to learn about intracellular dynamics by making movies of molecular motors ‘tagged’ with fluorescent probes. The probes—called Up Conversion NanoParticles (UCNPs)—have three features that make them superior to existing fluorescent probes and which suit them for intracellular single particle tracking. First, UCNPs fluoresce at different colors than the light emitted by other cellular components, thus offering superior contrast relative to nearby objects. Second, UCNP fluorescence is spectrally much narrower than that of commonly used fluorescent probes, allowing a larger number of distinct cellular components—each tagged with a different color—to be simultaneously tracked. Third, UCNPs can be used to track a cellular object for much longer (hours or days) than is typical using existing fluorescent probes (a few minutes). Peng will use UCNPs to study the nonequilibrium dynamics of two molecular motors, dynein and kinesin, as they transport ‘cargo’ from place to place within a cell along intracellular protein polymers. The research team will attach probes to cargo and/or motors and then record movies that track probe position as revealed by the UCNP fluorescence. The plan is to begin by quantifying motor dynamics at various points in a motor’s traversal of a cell and then explore why motor behavior varies by gaining an ever-increasing level of detail about the local cellular environment. Particular experimental attention will be paid to how motor efficiency varies in relation to varying cellular conditions, efficiency-affecting interactions between motors and between motors and cargo, and the relation of observed motor efficiency to efficiency constraints predicted by thermodynamic theory. 

Multicellular organisms operate through cell differentiation.  What begins as an initial pool of uniform, isogenic cells eventually develops into a suite of distinct cell types, each performing specialized functions in the organism as a whole. This specialization process can be thought of as a form of information processing . A simplified overall picture of this information processing is that a receptor -for instance at the cell membrane- detects a signal molecule and a signaling network then acts as 'wiring' to relay information to downstream components, which then produce an appropriate cellular response. The signaling network is a chain of biochemical events which link an upstream molecular signal to a downstream 'cis-regulation' system in order to achieve a particular gene-expression pattern that--in this case--specifies cell type.  This grant supports work by Michael Elowitz, Professor of Biology and of Bioengineering at Caltech, to create a synthetic cell fate control system. The system, if successful, will allow one to begin with a pool of genetically identical cells and then -using a small number of 'input' signals- direct various subsets of the pool to differentiate and develop into distinct, predetermined cell types. Elowitz proposes to achieve this goal by using the tools of synthetic biology to develop the two core subsystems briefly sketched above: a 'signaling network'; a complex network of proteins to process chemical 'signals' and relay them downstream and a downstream 'cis-regulation' system that drives expression of a specific gene or set of genes. The signaling network and gene regulation system will be integrated into natural cells to demonstrate cell fate control and differentiation into targeted cell types. If successful, this project will advance our understanding of and control over cellular information processing and provide a foundation for extending synthetic biology into multicellularity.