$3 million over five years for multidisciplinary efforts to convert and store renewable energy
By Doug Most
If the extreme heat and droughts, catastrophic flooding, and devastating wildfires of recent years have proven anything, it’s that the world needs better solutions for sustainable energy in order to help combat the damaging effects of climate change.
That’s why the National Science Foundation has awarded a Boston University team led by Associate Professor Malika Jeffries-EL (Chemistry, MSE) a five-year, $3 million NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) grant to help PhD students collaborate across disciplines to develop new ways to convert and store sustainable energy. The award will create a new training program that unifies resources in engineering, chemistry, computer science, and data sciences to provide participating students with a broad exposure to energy-related issues.
The NRT grant is a collaborative award between BU’s Institute for Global Sustainability and the Rafik B. Hariri Center for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. Along with Jeffries-EL, the project’s co–principal investigators are College of Engineering faculty Associate Professor Emily Ryan (ME, MSE), Assistant Professor James Chapman (ME), and Associate Professor Brian Kulis (ECE), as well as College of Arts & Sciences Professor of Chemistry and Computing & Data Sciences David Coker.
“We are at a point where we need to be intentional with problems we are tackling,” says Jeffries-EL, who is also associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. “It’s all interconnected. These are complicated problems, and it requires an interdisciplinary approach and interdisciplinary science.”
And getting PhD students involved in the work is critical.
Read the full story at BU’s The Brink
Wildfire haze photo by Thom Milkov on Unsplash