BU Wins $3 Million NSF Training Grant For Convergent Research in Sustainable Energy Conversion and Storage
Collaborative award between Hariri Institute’s Center for Computational Science (CCS) and the Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS) aims to develop the workforce the U.S. energy sector needs to solve complex sustainability challenges at the industrial level
The development of sustainable energy is one of the most important grand challenges society faces. The number of people on Earth has grown from approximately one billion in 1800 to almost eight billion in 2022. Current projections estimate that the world population will be 9.8 billion by the year 2050, increasing the demand on critical resources like energy, food, and water. Solving a complex problem such as providing clean energy for the world requires a convergent approach in which scientists and engineers from various fields work collaboratively.
Boston University has won a $3 Million NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) grant that will create a training program aimed at developing the workforce that the U.S. energy sector needs to solve these complex challenges at the industrial level. The program will tackle one of society’s most urgent challenges: sustainable energy, conversion, and storage. Over the next five years, this interdisciplinary program will prepare PhD students to work collaboratively across engineering, chemistry, computer science, and data sciences to develop innovative solutions for a greener future.
ENERGIZE NRT brings together students from engineering, chemistry, computer science, and data science to break through traditional academic silos.
“Climate change, with its complex challenges, demands an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates data science in order to expedite testing theories,” says Malika Jeffries, PI and associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and associate professor in the department of chemistry and division of materials science. “We must combine expertise across multiple fields and develop the ability to analyze vast amounts of data and make predictions to develop effective, scalable solutions”
“Computation and data science are playing key roles in designing and discovering new materials to address society’s clean, renewable energy needs,” adds Co-PI David Coker, director of the Hariri Institute’s Center for Computational Science, and professor of chemistry, and computing & data sciences. “This NRT grant will fund the development of new graduate training programs that synergistically bring together data and computational scientists, and materials fabrication, synthesis and characterization experts, to guide and educate a new generation of researchers capable of working at the intersections of these fields and pushing forward this critical frontier research.”
The idea for such a program was seeded by a 2021 Hariri Institute’s Focused Research Program (FRP), which recognized early on the immense potential of data science in revolutionizing energy research.
Read the NSF award public abstract here.
Learn more in The Brink story here.