Six research proposals across various disciplines have been awarded funding through the Seed Project Fund of the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy, and Climate (VSEC), totaling more than $1.2 million for the program’s inaugural awards.
The SPF, which provided funds up to $300,000, is designed to support early-stage, exploratory research on transformative ideas that foster interdisciplinary collaborations on topics relevant to the VSEC mission on complex and integrated systems and its core pillars: energy integration; resource sustainability; climate change mitigation/adaptation; and system risk reliability, and resilience.
The goal is to generate preliminary results that enhance Vanderbilt’s research reputation and position projects for securing external funding from federal agencies or philanthropic organizations.
“By providing seed funding to teams across campus, we’re helping spark the kind of multidisciplinary collaboration that leads to new discoveries,” said VSEC director Hussam Mahmoud, Craig E. Philip Endowed Chair of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering. “These projects embody the spirit of innovation we want to cultivate by bringing diverse expertise across Vanderbilt together to solve complex problems.”
The fund supported two types of projects: collaborative research projects up to $150,000 per year (2-year max), with an additional supplement of up to $25,000 for experimental or computationally intensive projects, and center planning grants up to $50,000 for lead principal investigators preparing center-level proposals. In the latter case, funds may cover course buyouts, travel, or organizing symposiums to facilitate proposal preparation.
Proposals are reviewed according to multiple criteria, including relevance to VSEC, intellectual merit, potential for broader impact, interdisciplinary collaboration, potential for external funding, and team qualification. All full-time, VU-employed faculty are eligible for the SPF, including non-tenure track faculty.
The awarded proposals comprise teams of principal investigators that span multiple colleges, schools, and departments across campus including divinity, engineering, law, arts and science, and nursing. They are:
- “Co-Optimization of Mixed-Mode Electric Vehicle (EV) Fleets for Energy Stability and Extreme Events,” Abhishek Dubey and Co-PI Ayan Mukhopadhyay – $300,000.
- “Fundamental understanding of hydrodynamic and electrochemical interplay in flow electrode systems,” Haoxiang Luo and Co-PI Shihong Lin – $300,000.
- “Religious Institutions as Sites of Climate Adaptation and Resiliency,” Joerg Rieger and Co-PIs Brian Christens and Calynn Dowler – $300,000.
- “Mobilizing carbon offsetting and the voluntary carbon market (VCM) to mitigate both climate change and health disparities in the US,” Zdravka Tzankova and Co-PIs Carol Ziegler and James Muchira – $147,500.
- “AI-driven road temperature monitoring and prediction for urban sustainability,” Huidong Li and Co-PIs Jonathan Gilligan, Abhishek Dubey and Christopher Vanags – $103,548.
- “Using Information Disclosure to Address the Artificial Intelligence Energy Emergency,” Michael Vandenbergh and Co-PI Mark J. Williams – $52,000.