Wednesday, January 16, 2008

MIT Energy Initiative awards more than $1.6M in grants

MIT has awarded more than $1.6 million in a first round of campus seed grants to 17 research projects in areas such as solar technology, climate change impacts and power transmission.

The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) selected the winners from 54 proposals submitted by members of all of MIT's departments, officials said, and multidisciplinary projects were especially encouraged.

The program was able to raise money from the Chesonis Foundation, the MIT-Singapore programs, the deans of science and engineering, and private donors, in addition to MITEI's own funding, According to MITEI director Ernest Moniz.

New grants will be awarded twice a year, over the course of the next five years, according to officials.

The seed grant recipients are:

• Tonio Buonassisi (mechanical engineering) and Gerbrand Ceder (materials science and engineering) for ultra-high efficiency thin film heterojunction solar cells using earth-abundant, scalable materials;
• Sallie "Penny" Chisholm (civil and environmental engineering and biology) for advancing our understanding of Prochlorococcus, the Earth's smallest and most abundant photosynthetic machine;
• Catherine Drennan (chemistry) for enzymatic control of pollutants and greenhouse gases;
• Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone (economics) and Amy Smith (mechanical engineering) for studying the health consequences of energy consumption in India;
• Steven Leeb and James Kirtley (electrical engineering and computer science) and Les Norford (architecture) for "no watt left behind";
• Thomas Malone and John Sterman (Sloan School of Management), Hal Abelson, Mark Klein and David Karger (electrical engineering and computer science) for harnessing collective intelligence to address global climate change;
• Joseph Minervini and Leslie Bromberg (plasma science and fusion center) for superconducting DC power transmission and distribution;
• Keith Nelson (chemistry) and Gang Chen (mechanical engineering) for characterization of phonon mean free path and thermal transport in thermoelectric materials;
• Kristala Jones Prather (chemical engineering) for microbial synthesis of pentanol as a biofuel;
• Joel Schindall and John Kassakian (electrical engineering and computer science) and Donald Sadoway (materials science and engineering) for electrochemical cell evaluation and design for MIT nanotube-enhanced ultracapacitor;
• Janelle Thompson and Roman Stocker (civil and environmental engineering) for the investigation of subsurface microbial processes during and after geological carbon sequestration.

Ignition grant recipients are:

• Marilyne Andersen (architecture) for moving toward a balance between light, heat and comfort: angularly and spectrally selective envelopes for energy-efficient buildings;
• Silvija Gradecak (materials science and engineering) for semiconductor nanowires for thermoelectric applications;
• Tomas Palacios (electrical engineering and computer science) for nitride-based electronics for high-efficiency power conversion;
• Michael Strano (chemical engineering) for demonstrating biomimetic self-repair in photoelectrochemical energy production systems;
• Troy Van Voorhis (chemistry) for studying the structural characterization of organic photovoltaics and fuel-forming catalysts via designer force fields;
• Bilge Yildiz (nuclear science and engineering) for nano-structured alloys against corrosion in advanced nuclear plants.