Advisory committee for environmental research and education september 12, 2012

The partnerships were mentioned earlier and we felt very good about the partnerships that we’ve developed for this program, both within NSF. Geo has been the strongest part of their contributing funding in each of those three years. But also outside of NSF, we brought in China, NSF China as a partner in the beginning of this program in the initial solicitation. We agreed to co-fund proposals that were -- research coordination network proposals. That was sort of -- you just heard about as a more SEES-wide activity. But we chose to do that as a way of trying to stimulate the community -- communities, if you will, in the U.S. and China, to develop some additional collaborations.

We funded one RCM, our international RCM, in each of the first two years of the program. That track was still available this third year, but we did not receive any IRCM proposals. We did however receive 13 research proposals because in this year, we opened up the possibility for research activities -- research projects that were jointly funded by NSF and NSFC. We also, this year, created a partnership with the State of Sao Paolo in Brazil with FAPESP, the funding agency there. We’ve reviewed three proposals and have one recommendation, which has not quite gone out the door yet. It’s at DGA now. And then we also established a partnership with NASA this year. NASA is co-funding two of our projects and their intent is to continue that collaboration for at least one more year. Hopefully, a third year beyond that.

So, we’ve been able to put what we think is a very strong set of awards out the door. I have some copies of this booklet here, which I think you may have seen at your spring meeting. If anyone wants a copy, I have some here. These have descriptions of each of the awards made in 2010 and 2011 and we’ll be updating that as soon as all the 2012 awards are out the door.

We have five streams of activity for this overall Dimensions of Biodiversity campaign. I’ve been focusing on the first of these, the research activity. There is effort in Cyberinfrastructure and Collections, which is being spearheaded through DBI, Division of Biological Infrastructure. And then we also have some efforts focused on workforce that we are in the process of finalizing now and we see down the road an important component of this being synthesis. There was an initial offered on that in our distributed graduate seminar that was funded in 2010 to do some baselining for the current state of our knowledge about biodiversity. That’s an activity, which we assume will be ongoing and we’ll probably repeat as, in a more formal way, towards the end of this campaign to assess what kind of progress we’ve made.

And with that, I’ll stop and answer questions.

DR. RUTH: So, Dynamics of Coupled Natural Human Systems was a much older program that we’ve sort of grandfathered into as a kind of SEES associate a couple of years ago. We’ve actually running since 2001 and we reformed as an independent program in 2007.

Our solicitation is less focused on a particular theme or geographic region than some of the others. We really say only that if you’re going to be funded under our program then you need to be undertaking a systems approach at some part of the interface between humans and natural systems -- that is, the humans and the natural systems have to be really part of one combined system, each as one interchanged in the other. So, we’re a little bit different from the others, but really, within that paradigm, we’ll take pretty much any topic.

We have three different-sized types of awards. We have large ones, which are up to $1.5 million over five years, then we have an exploratory strand that we introduced a couple of years ago, which are much smaller proposals, really for teams that are just forming, and we also offer research coordination networks, in much of the same way as many of the other programs do.

So, in 2012, we made a total of 19 award recommendations out of a total of -- actually, it was 132 proposals all together. And they covered, again, quite a range of topics. One thing we like to see, and we are seeing increasingly, is a very, very strong international component to a lot of our projects. We had all parts of Asia, China, India, Mongolia, many, many countries in Africa, Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda, pretty much around the length of Central and South America, and we had some projects in the Pacific Islands as well. So, pleased to see that and, in fact, the domestic projects also were very compelling as well, but great, we are getting this much bigger international dimension.

So, if you were to look down the list of our 19 recommendations, we have a few themes -- perhaps it’s died out but a number of our proposals deal with ecosystems in one form or another, either marine or forest or sometimes agricultural. Again, looking at services that those ecosystems offer and also how we are living among them and restoring them and damaging them and that constant dynamic there.

A couple on health. One looking at mosquitoes in different climate regimes. Another looking at damage to health caused by cook stoves and local meteorological conditions.

Another theme in our proposals, in our funded projects, the evolution of ancient societies alongside their landscapes and their resources. Often a heavy archeological component in those. The idea being that when you have some significant societal shift, that often brings about conditions of vulnerability and, I guess, critical transitions that we really could learn a lot from today.

As I mentioned, agriculture and fisheries is big, reoccurring themes. Very strong, “tragedy of the commons” type discussions to be held in those two domains. And underpinning a lot of what we do, and increasingly over time, actually, these questions of resilience and vulnerability as we become more concerned and more aware of the possible impacts of climate change, that really is a theme that walks through many of our front doors.

Finally, just a quick chart of our success rates. We have a little bit going in our current link formation since 2007, and a couple of things that I think are sort of somewhat interesting from this, that stand out to me anyway as a program officer. In the first column, the number of project proposals, if you see that, you know, we started around 80, 64, went up to nearly a hundred, 2009, 2010. We’re now currently seeing over 130 proposals every year. That’s in spite of all the other activity within SEES. So, we’re really seeing a very strong increase in demand over time. While it is not as we hoped, unfortunately, being offset by takeoff from other programs, we are still seeing really, very, very large amounts of proposals.

And also, our success rates currently hover around -- we’ve managed to keep those stable, actually, but the different directorates have been extremely helpful in helping us to keep a respectable funding rate. We’re up to about 14, 15 percent typically, but that’s for all proposals. Of fundable proposals, good, fundable, solid proposals, we’re still managing to fund somewhere around 40 to 50 percent so again, this -- we’re not doing too badly from that one but interesting figures, I think. SEES fellows.

DR. PIBEL: I also don’t have any prepared slides, so just have comments.

The SEES Fellows track is designed to build the scientific and engineering recourse for sustainability, so it’s more in lines of education and human resource development kind of activity at NSF. The inaugural solicitation competition was last year, fiscal year 2012. It’s a very nice post-docky [spelled phonetically] kind of fellowship for people sort of a few years postdoctoral degree. Kind of interesting twist with it. The post-docs actually apply through Fast Lane to NSF. They’re the PIs on the proposals. They need to have at least two mentors. An award is made to a university, so they need to have an academic mentor and they also have what we call a partner mentor and that can be somebody either industry, governmental, any kind of relevant things to, sort of, to increase the impact of the activities. And these are very interdisciplinary projects from these young people, which is, I think, sort of typical for the SEES portfolio.

Support is provided for two to three years depending on what the project requires. The first year, the inaugural year, we had 182 proposals. We had romantic panels during the Valentine week --

[laughter]

-- at NSF, so we had panelists who were willing to give up time with their significant others to come and review proposals with us.

After sort of entrepreneurial bleeding across the foundation for money from partners in OISE, EPSCoR, et cetera, and we were able to make 20 awards to PI; so 20 young scientist engineers working on these projects. It’s quite a diverse group. Thirteen states represented in the awards in terms of the grantee institutions. $8.8 million in the total support.

In addition, this is one of the first, I think, official SEES activities we had, so we had a feedback meeting with panelists, with all of the ADs -- oh, I should mention, this is cross-NSF. I think every research directorate participates with about $1 million sort of promised at the start. The feedback -- panelists provide feedback to the ADs on the processes, what was good, what was bad, things to think about in going forward. We used a lot of this feedback in crafting a new solicitation for fiscal year ‘13, which has just come out. Levels of funding is about the same. We don’t know how many proposals we’ll get, of course, so success rate was a little bit better than 10 percent, so it’s likely to go down a little bit in ’13 if we see an increase in the number of proposals that we have.

Some of the topics -- I mentioned these are very interdisciplinary kind of projects. These are the ones I like so they don’t represent anything except kind of what I think is cool. We have one looking at wastewater treatment with sand and bacteria by refineries in seabeds, so it’s essentially trying to use bugs to make commodity chemicals using wastewater. So, taking something that nobody wants and turning it into gold.

Here’s one that’s sort of interface of CISE and evolutionary biology developing semi-parametric models, algorithms, and tools for ecological analysis of species biodiversity. This is one that the panel was very excited about in terms of developing new kinds of tools for sort of doing ecological studies.

What other ones? Lot of sort of things that a lot -- one of the interesting things we saw with this was that there was sort of a heavy kind of SBE-type activities in many of the proposals. I think one of the other things we saw was -- not so much that, say, the SBE activity is sort of cutting edge science, or social behavioral economic science, but the de-integration of certainly the natural science and the SBE science was something that was new. I think most of these projects probably couldn’t get funded in sort of single disciplinary a post-doc type program.

And I think that’s it.

DR. ROBIN: George? We have two more and then we’ll take some questions for whole team.

DR. MARACAS: Hi, I’m George Maracas. This is the SEP management team, a bunch of very motivated and wild and crazy people.

[laughter]

[unintelligible] from MPS; he’s a chemist. We don’t hold that against them too badly --

[laughter]

-- but again, engineers and chemists can actually speak.

Sustainable energy pathways is the first solicitation of its kind where it marries the science -- the basic science with engineering, innovation, and the societal, behavioral, and economic aspects. The idea is to look at sustainable energy -- look at pathways to achieving sustainable energy from cradle to grave perspective or systems approach or life cycle analysis; whichever way you are predisposed to thinking of that.

The approach that we’re using is to nucleate communities that are cross-disciplinary and NPS, engineering, size, geo, and SBE, our communities were sort of required to work together as competencies, if you like, in the proposals. Initially $34 million was raised for this solicitation. In the end, we raised an extra $3 million from BIO, EPSCoR, MPS [unintelligible]. So it allows us to fund two more awards. The difference between the science here, this -- the requirement was that if your proposal fit into a core program at NSF, it was not acceptable for SEP. You had to have the three fundamental considerations of scientific knowledge, technological innovation, environmental, societal and economic imperatives, and education and work force development. So the SBE directorate played a very large role and has a presence in all of the awards that were made. So the awards are for four years, approximately $1.8 million. And I should say that the subjects you can read over there. It goes from energy collection, harvesting conversion, interface of the grid, interface to fuels. It covers both electricity and fuels.

The proposal process went like this: We received 435 proposals on February 1. We didn't have to have romantic panels.

[laughter]

We just had less than romantic self-sorting sessions. Out of the proposals, 307 proposals were unique projects, including the linked collaboratives, compliance. I filtered out 32 more, which left us with 275 proposals to process before the end of the year. With the budget cuts in travel, this made it a little bit more complex so we initiated -- had to have virtual panels. We had 11 virtual panels in one week. I'm not going to say anymore.

[laughter]

Especially because we had I think about 400 proposals. Finding reviewers that were not conflicted, it was a real challenge. Anyway, no, we did it, we did it. And so what we found out was that the virtual panel experiment was really, really good in filtering out proposals that didn't have technical compliance. In other words, you know, interdisciplinary was -- SEP defined it, it was not the chemist introduced by the way a chemical engineer. It had economic and environment, societal, those were filtered out by the panel. That was very efficient.

And the technical criteria, the SBE criteria were -- basically the proposals were screened on that; 15 percent of those went to an off-site panel. Let's just say this really worked very well having thematic panels on all of the subjects here. There was a panel for each one of those subjects or two panels for each of those subjects. They raised the top, you know, 15 percent initially those themes. That 15 percent went on to -- the reporting proposals went on to the on-site panel, which was a very spirited group of people. And they came to the Tower of Babel because --

[laughter]

-- because we had to represent small participants. Something I never even knew we had.

So that was where we had to really see whether there was a synergy among the scientists, the chemists -- hardly done chemists because that's not here. And then the economists, so forth and so on. And we made 20 awards. Nineteen of the 20 awards as of now, as of today, have been actually awarded.

At the bottom the financials look like this. The breakdown in the contributions is like this for 17 divisions actually contributed. And the number of awards are seven in MPS, seven in engineering, two in CISE, two in GEO, and two in SBE.

Those are the ones that are [unintelligible], and of course there's co-funding of several of those. There's no plan for an FY ‘13 solicitation. However, there is tentative discussion about FY ‘14 if there's any question, right?

DR. CAVANAUGH: Yes.

DR. MARACAS: It's a budget?

DR. CAVANAUGH: It's all for you, George. [laughter]

DR. MARACAS: Okay. So on to the fun stuff. This is a collage of some of the projects. You don't have to look at all these, but just enjoy the colors. [laughter]

But the point is, the point is that there are -- these were the -- floated to the top. It's an amazing process that we went through and we have projects from, you know, bio-degradable wind turban blades, which gets around the problem of how do you dispose of 30,000 steel blades a year? Broken blades, tidal turbans in Puget Sound to evaluate what the potential -- how much energy can you get potentially out of tidal power. We have integrated solar, heat, radio frequency, energy harvesting devices. Nano electronics. Nanophotonics. We have very high density energy storage with new materials down here with lithium pyrite. New organic materials both up here for trying to get organic portable [unintelligible] cells of about 15 percent efficiency. Termites, I hate termites. I had a wooden house.

[laughter]

Using the termite-specific enzymes to digest bio-mass, to make bio fuels. There's the CO2 plume geothermal which combines basically a CO2 capture, collect the CO2, send it way underground and pressurize the hot gases and push it up into a heat by geothermal energy so you bury the CO2 down deep, three miles into the ground while getting heat up top.

This is an awesome one, too. This calcium oxide production without carbon dioxide. Cement these days, carbon dioxide-free cement. To make 10 pounds of cement you generate, right now, you generate nine pounds of CO2.

No CO2. You need four electrons here. Where do you get the electrons? Solar power; awesome.

Okay. So now this is all the science stuff. We're going to the systems areas. So you've got bio and chemists, a lot of chemists, materials people and now we're going to the system side over there and up at the top is buildings -- they're becoming aware of you and what your preferences are, and your preferences and behaviors actually modify the control systems in the buildings. A lot of behavioral, you know, scientists in there.

Down to the bottom, make sure I didn't mention policy people. So the smart grid, the smart grid type systems that, you know, combine size, engineering, electrical engineering, and math. Generating tools that can visualize what happens in a very complex smart grid where you have high penetration of renewable energy, wind, solar, blah blah blah. How do you model that system? How do you visualize it? How do you help the policymakers be people in industry? And the power utilities, how do you help them make informed decisions about that? Sliding power lines, where to put the resources, you know, the generation and storage, things like that. So, clearly it's huge what's going on here and we're all excited. I'm more excited than anybody I know.

[laughter]

DR. RUTH: Okay, Sustainability Research Networks was another that I was lucky enough to coordinate this year. It's the biggest single award size in the SEES program. And it was a new venture for us this year, so the solicitation went out over the summer, and it was something that had been developed at more of a conceptual level than with any of us actually knowing what it was that we were looking for, so we spent a year trying to figure that out. Lots of proposals came in in different phases. We were able to refine our expectations and our ideas about the program better I think, so now we're able to [unintelligible] whole competition around that.

The four things that we really did say you have to have, that we kind of knew. We thought, well, we knew it was there. You know, you had to have grand challenge. These are going to be big awards up to $12 million each so, you know, that's not as big as the center but it's bigger than a lot of research grants. It’s A to Z in each award for instance. So watching grand challenges. If you're going to do this at that kind of scale, you're going to be integrating science, engineering, and education. You've got to have all of those involved. One you can't see very well because it’s a bit pale in its rendition, is that we really wanted to have lots of different people involved. This is going to be a bit different. [unintelligible] is enabling an integration of prospectus from the academic sector and the private sector from government through NGOs, from foreign partners. So we were really trying to make sure that what we didn't just have was a group of people who always worked together doing the same thing, but what we wanted to really exploit was the potential for getting people from different parts of the overall enterprise. And finally it had to have an interdisciplinary approach, which, again, if you're anything in sustainability you're going to have to have a range of backgrounds and perspectives. You're going to have to social scientists of course, but you’re also going to need to have all of your other domains represented. So, we left it open really after that and so if you've got something that fits that then come in. The vision was that the awards would be that we would make up to three or four awards this year. We would have -- each one would be four or five years. And because I guess the novelty and the uncertainty really about what we were doing, we decided we would make them as cooperative agreements, which means that in the office we're going to have much more -- as program offices rather, we’re going to have much more involvement than we would if it were just a grant. Because we want to make sure that we continue to make these things as successful and as true to what we were hoping for as we could.

So this is our -- this is what we spent the last year doing. We took in 205 preliminary proposals at the end of calendar 2011. We put those through four proposal -- preliminary proposal panels. From that we invited 36 large proposals, full-size proposals to come in. Those were 36 we felt had potential that could really be developed into something that would look like an SRN. We held that panel in May, after which we had about nine networks that really looked like they were worth another look. We felt that each one of those actually had some issues but they each also had a lot of outstanding qualities, so we had those in four reverse surfaces, which meant we did video conferences with the networking team over a period of about a week and a half during June.

From that we found that two very clear winners emerged. There were two of those teams -- well one particularly that we all felt, even though we hadn't really know what we were looking for at the beginning, it was it, you know. That was what we had been hoping to see come out. And another that most of us quite liked and felt that it would be pretty good as well. So those two came out as very highly recommended. The other seven had a number of issues. They largely were not networks, for instance. They were very centered on specific institutions. Some of them the research component wasn't terribly well developed. A lot of them could probably put it off if they had another year to refine their ideas and do something else. But right now, we only really have the two that we were ready for.

And I put them up here -- they haven't been made yet, so these are recommendations rather than awards. I’d hope they’d be awards by the time we got to this point. But things are going well. We're just finalizing the agreements. So the two that we recommended and that seem to be being processed, one by Ryan of Colorado-Boulder, which is all about basically fracking, looking at the physical science and the hydrology, air quality right through to the social impact. So again, fairly well rounded approach to a very, very topical and very important problem.

And the other one -- the one that actually we did all -- field was very strong -- was -- is by [unintelligible] at Penn State, which is really looking at trying to identify -- it's really a modeling -- assessment modeling project -- identifying climate tipping points, when things starting to become irreversibly damaged, and looking at a whole range of ways we might try and -- try and deal with that. So we’re looking at different mitigation strategies and putting all that together in one coherent system. It includes, for instance, what might be the potential benefits of geo engineering; when do you start doing that, and when would it be useful? So two very strong awards that we’re both -- we’re very enthusiastic about.