University of Colorado at Boulder

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Organizations that support those who are vulnerable, such as migrants fleeing war zones or veterans who return home after serving during war time, operate under chronic duress and uncertainty. Computing technologies and data are increasingly important to how these organizations provide services, but little is known about how these organizations build data and technological capacity in the face of severe constraints—they generally have limited resources, experience high demand for their services, and need to adapt to changing needs and conditions. This project is designed to understand how organizations use technology to increase their resilience, which will yield key insights into how technological solutions might be designed to further promote resilience not just for human service organizations, but other organizations with similar constraints and needs. This project will contribute empirical insights and design implications to better support the sociotechnical infrastructure work of organizations serving refugee communities. The research team will conduct interviews and focus groups with a number of such organizations, including ones created by and for refugees. Through these, the research team will develop models describing the range of strategies that these organizations are using to be resilient in their technology use and how they draw on data and information technology as part of their everyday work. These results will be used to inform a second phase of design-focused research that includes both organizations that respond to refugee needs and refugees themselves, centered around participatory design sessions aimed at envisioning possible futures. The outcomes of these sessions will encourage community members to envision a more technically robust future, yield implications for both future design possibilities and practice, and pose novel research questions around organizational resilience in the face of constraints. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-01

The broader impact of this I-Corps project is based on the development of a novel soil microbial activity sensor technology to assist in determining soil health in real-time. Soil health is a key factor underlying the productivity of global agricultural systems and the stability of natural ecosystems. Gaining insights into microbial decomposition is useful for understanding soil function, evaluating nutrient cycling, and ensuring stable agricultural outputs. By providing continuous measurements of soil microbial decomposition, the technology is may enable precision land management practices that promote soil health, improve farm economics, and help to ensure long-term productivity. This project will evaluate potential business opportunities for the developed sensors within various market sectors including in agriculture and forestry. This I-Corps project utilizes experiential learning coupled with a first-hand investigation of the industry ecosystem to assess the translation potential of the technology. The solution is based on the development of a novel soil sensor technology that enables continuous, electronic, in-field monitoring of microbially-driven organic carbon decomposition processes. This innovation utilizes a composite conductive material prepared from the combination of a biodegradable biopolymer binder and carbon micro-particles to create resistors which are dynamically responsive to microbial activity. This material can be formulated into ink and deposited onto substrates using a readily scalable screen-printing technique for the manufacture of sensors. When this material is exposed to biologically active environments, the biopolymer binder is degraded by microbial activity, leading to an increase in the electrical resistance of the material. The observed rate of resistance change provides a directly measure of microbial decomposition activity. This approach provides a straightforward signal with a large resistance change (up to 10x) and as such, the sensors require only simple, low-cost, readily deployable electronic systems for readout. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-01

This project will work in partnership with a rural school district and two community organizations to collaboratively design an innovative middle school computer science-rich curriculum that highlights sustainable food production in local community gardens. Building upon an established rural research practice partnership, the project will generate opportunities for middle school students to engage in computer science learning grounded in serving their community, where many families face food insecurity. The open-source garden-based curriculum will integrate physical computing systems and 3D visualization software, aligned with established computer science and disciplinary science standards, and provide students with authentic learning experiences that promote personally meaningful connections to computer science in their local community. The curriculum will utilize a place-based approach that enables students to deeply explore computer science concepts and identify “invisible” computer science opportunities in their community. In addition to curriculum development, this project will focus heavily on the progression and growth of a rural research-practice partnership, including forming sustainable partnerships between the school district and local organizations that share the goal of promoting rural students’ participation in computer science education. This project will generate knowledge and theory by adopting new methods for conceptualizing and investigating students’ perceptions of belonging in computer science in an established rural research-practice partnership. In doing so, researchers will utilize a design-based research approach to examine (1) how the curriculum helps to foreground students’ engagement, interest, and belonging in computer science, and (2) how the research practice partnership progresses to become more sustainable and scalable. The following three research questions will be addressed: 1) How can an existing rural research-practice partnership be leveraged to support the collaborative design and implementation of a community garden-based computer science-rich curricula? 2) How does the collaborative design of a community garden-based computer science-rich curricula support convergence between stakeholders to promote growth and progression of the research-practice partnership to become transformational and scalable? 3) To what extent does the computer science-rich curriculum stimulate interest, engagement, and a sense of belonging among rural youth and increase their understanding of targeted computer science concepts? To answer these questions, the project team will use a mixed-methods approach to analyze both qualitative and quantitative data collected during iterative cycles of computer science-rich curricular collaborative design, classroom implementation, and other partnership-sustaining activities. By studying the community partnerships cultivated in the research-practice partnership, the project will advance the theory of scaling to include strategic connections at local, state, and national levels. Study results can inform other research-practice partnership efforts aimed at crafting computer science-rich curriculum and integrating physical computing (e.g., programmable sensors) into K-12 education. This project is funded through the Computer Science for All: Research and RPPs program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Understanding where large volumes of magma live in Earth’s crust before eruption is critical for hazard assessment at many volcanoes. Scientists can determine the magma storage conditions of some historic eruptions using minerals transported to the surface. Those mineral compositions reflect the temperature, pressures and water contents at depth. But to tie minerals to those variables like temperature and pressure, researchers need models. This team proposes to create a new model for biotite, which occurs in many large-volume eruptions. To create this new model, the researchers will grow biotite in experiments at high temperatures and pressures, like those deep in the Earth. They will then study the compositions of the minerals, fluids, and glasses made in those experiments. These experiments and resulting model will be a significant contribution to our understanding of these magmas. By implementing their solution model in MELTS, which is well known by many geochemists, they ensure that many users will be able to easily access their deliverables using accessible code in a Jupyter notebook. This project will also train a PhD student in chemical analysis and high-temperature experiments. It will support a postdoctoral fellow and 3-6 undergraduates, and includes a partnership with the Mentoring and Teaching Creates Hope (MATCH) program, which is a literacy improvement program at NMT. This partnership will generate readings and experiment pairings for third grade students to improve their literacy and help them engage with science concepts. Unlocking the record of temperature and pressure associated with the formation of voluminous silicic magmas recorded by minerals requires carefully designed experiments to provide a thermodynamic framework to establish how mineral-melt or mineral-mineral equilibria relate to P-T-X conditions. Biotite is a common mineral in silicic igneous rocks that has the potential to record pre-eruptive temperatures, pressures, H2O and fO2s. However, biotite has not been exploited as a recorder of intensive variables in magmas owing to the paucity of experiments that generate analyzable biotite crystals, which has prevented development of solution models that accurately depict the activity-composition relationships for igneous biotite compositions. The researchers propose to develop a new solution model for igneous biotite that accounts for substitution of Fe3+ and Ti on octahedral sites based on a new set of buffered, fluid-saturated experiments they plan to conduct. This new solution model will allow users to transform biotite compositions into activity values for biotite end members, which can be used to unlock the records of temperature, fO2 and/or H2O recorded in common, biotite-bearing assemblages in silicic magmas. The researchers will generate a suite of biotite-bearing experiments (conducted in cold seal vessels at varying temperature, pressure and fO2) along with a suite of biotite standards, where biotite Fe3+/FeT values are assessed with micro-colorimetry, the flank method using electron microprobe, and through XANES spectroscopy. Minerals and glasses will be analyzed with electron microprobe. Fluids in mixed volatile experiments will be analyzed with RAMAN spectroscopy and LA-ICPMS. These experiments and chemical data will be used to provide a calibration for the biotite solution model, which will enable researchers to utilize this mineral for understanding pre-eruptive fO2 and fH2O contents of natural samples or experiments and for assessing equilibrium in natural samples or experiments. The solution model will be implemented in MELTS (an open-source thermodynamic model), so that it will be available to a wide user base. Additionally, the work will generate a suite of oriented biotite standards with known Fe3+/FeT and a new method for growing large biotite crystals. The scope of work includes training in chemical analysis (wet chemistry, microprobe, XANES analyses, Raman spectroscopy) and high temperature experiments for a PhD student, a postdoctoral fellow and 3-6 undergraduates, over the duration of the award. The work also includes a partnership with the Mentoring and Teaching Creates Hope (MATCH) program, which is a literacy improvement program at NMT. This partnership will generate readings and experiment pairings for third grade students to improve their literacy and help them engage with science concepts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Mountainous terrain contains complex atmospheric motions that impact the formation of precipitation and the distribution of air pollution. This award is for the deployment of instruments that are capable of measuring isotopes in water vapor. Through these measurements, the researchers can determine how much mixing of air from lower elevations and higher elevations is occurring and how the mixing changes based on atmospheric conditions. The award will provide data that is important for the prediction of terrain-enhanced snowfall and the export of pollution out of mountain valleys. A graduate student will gain experience by leading the field experiment aspects of this project. This award will fund the deployment of a Picarro cavity ring-down spectrometer at the base of Mount Werner in Steamboat Springs, Colorado and a new portable instrument for measuring water vapor isotopes that will be transported to observe the changes in the isotope ratio with elevation. The deployments will be conducted in a heavily instrumented area due to the concurrent Snow Sensitivity to Clouds in a Mountain Environment (S2noCliME) field campaign in the Winter 24-25 season. In particular, an existing Picarro spectrometer hosted by Storm Peak Laboratory on Mount Werner and atmospheric balloon soundings from the campaign will be used alongside the measurements from this project to answer to key questions related to mixing: (1) What is the state of the air before it rises along the mountain slope, and (2) How does the mountain slope influence mixing between the boundary layer and residual layer/free troposphere as a function of wind direction and speed from a mid-tropospheric wind? This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-12

The ionosphere and thermosphere exhibit significant day-to-day variability even during quiet times. Understanding these background variations and their interrelationships is essential for effective space weather forecasting. This project aims to characterize how these quiet-time variabilities impact one another, a key factor in determining the responses of the ionosphere and thermosphere to geomagnetic storms. This research not only supports advancements in space weather prediction but also includes educational outreach activities to engage physics students and the public in space physics, fostering interests in STEM fields. Additionally, the project will provide hands-on training for a graduate student, enhancing his/her academic development in space physics research. This project aims to investigate the correlation between quiet time ionosphere day-to-day variability and quiet time thermosphere composition day-to-day variability. Through utilizing ground-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations, NASA's Global-scale Observations of Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission, and Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model eXtended (WACCM-X) simulations, this study involves identifying geomagnetically quiet periods and analyzing ground-based and satellite observations to characterize the two-dimensional patterns of ionospheric total electron content (TEC) and thermospheric column density ratio of atomic oxygen to molecular nitrogen (O/N2) day-to-day variability. Statistical analyses will be conducted to examine the spatial and temporal distributions of quiet time TEC and O/N2 day-to-day variability. Additionally, WACCM-X simulations will be performed to investigate the underlying mechanisms and assess the role of O/N2 day-to-day variability in TEC day-to-day variability through data-model comparisons and diagnostic analyses. This research endeavors to unravel the complexities of quiet time thermosphere and ionosphere day-to-day variability. The resulting database of quiet time TEC day-to-day variability and O/N2 day-to-day variability, as well as the numerical simulation results, will be a reference for the Aeronomy community to carry out related research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-11

The Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (AGS) operates the Community Instruments and Facilities (CIF) program to enhance the scientific community’s access to instrumentation that is otherwise too costly or complicated to operate for most institutions. This Community Instruments and Facilities (CIF) award is for the support and operation of Mobile Uncrewed Systems for Atmospheric Science (MUSAS) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The project is supported as a community facility within the Facilities for Atmospheric Research & Education (FARE) program in AGS. NSF funding for this award will enable the University of Colorado Boulder to make available three different Small uncrewed aircraft systems (sUAS) platforms and associated instrumentation for observational research in the lower atmosphere. The CIF also includes surface vehicles supporting the uncrewed aircraft systems. The MUSAS project will provide access to airspace for conducting research using the sUAS platforms through Certificates of Authorization (COAs) granted by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This NSF CIF award will provide partial baseline support for maintenance and operations support to make the MUSAS systems available to a diverse research and education community. sUAS platforms and associated ground vehicles offer opportunities to capture high quality, high resolution in-situ measurements of atmospheric processes in environments that may otherwise be too dangerous, monotonous, or challenging to sample. As such, MUSAS will be able to support a wide array of atmospheric research, including boundary layer processes, coastal circulations, aerosol processes, turbulence and turbulent fluxes, surface-atmosphere exchange, high-latitude environments, and severe weather. This award will enhance the ability of the broader scientific community to request and use the sUAS platforms and associated instrumentation for observational research in the lower atmosphere through the Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences facility request process. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

This project aims to serve the national interest by producing and testing tools to help introductory biology students acquire appropriate study strategies, monitor those skills, and evaluate their efficacy. Many students studying science face challenges in developing practical study skills. Adopting a new strategy requires students to assess their knowledge level; this process of reflection on one’s work allows them to create self-awareness. Once students are self-aware, they can evaluate and modify their study practices. This entire process is known as self-regulated learning; however, these self-evaluative processes are not commonly taught at the university level. Improving a student’s self-regulated learning can impact a student's study habits, knowledge, attitude, and performance. This project intends to involve students in different reflective practices as part of their coursework to increase self-regulated learning skills. The importance of this work lies in creating, testing, and sharing tools that can potentially help introductory-level students succeed and persist in their science studies. The proposed project will engage introductory biology students in different reflective practices, focusing on motivation and self-awareness. Thus far, few studies have investigated multiple self-regulation interventions on undergraduate science students on a large scale with appropriate controls. The proposed targeted self-regulation interventions are: 1) improving student motivation through personalized feedback and increasing personal relevance of course materials through a utility value exercise, 2) improving student metacognition through reflection and evaluation of one's preferred learning strategies, and 3) improving self-regulation through a series of informational training activities that include reflection and goal-setting. This project aims to test each intervention's efficacy using a randomized control crossover design in four large introductory biology courses, serving over 2000 students annually. This experimental design will be bolstered by collecting demographic data, performance, and other survey data from multiple time points for each student. The proposed interventions will be integrated into a commonly used learning management system, with accompanying student tasks to ensure participation. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, this project intends to advance understanding of how each intervention affects students' self-regulation, motivation, and performance. Once the effectiveness of the developed resources is determined, dissemination could occur across disciplines, expanding the project's scope to positively impact learning among all undergraduate science students. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports creating, exploring, and implementing promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

This three-year initiative, Teach Engineering: Expanding the democratization of engineering education through increased partnerships and professional development, is housed at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). Teach Engineering (TE) is the largest repository for K12 engineering lessons, activities, and teacher resources available for free in the U. S. The 1,600+ lessons, activities, informal sprinkles and maker challenges are aligned to NGSS, CCMS and ITEEA educational standards and disseminated via TeachEngineering.org. More than 3.3 million educators and other users accessed the TE digital library, potentially promoting technological and scientific literacy for millions of youths. The mission of TE is to democratize engineering education and create lifelong STEM opportunities for all youth by reaching educators across the nation, in both well-off and struggling schools, with free, design-focused, standards-aligned, hands-on engineering activities that rely upon readily available, inexpensive, simple materials. This project focuses on enhancing the content and increasing the visibility and usage of TE curricula and providing professional development for teachers. Project activities will expand the reach of TE through broadening the partnership base and building and expanding partnerships with members of the NAE (National Academy of Engineering), ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), CSTA (Computer Science Teachers Association) and other organizations, and with informal educators. The infusion of culturally relevant content in the TE library of existing and new resources, coupled with K12 teachers’ professional development and preparedness will expand the research-based offerings. The newly minted school-based TeachEngineering Educator Champions program has great potential to accelerate and increase the reach of TE. The use of the NCWIT engagement framework and toolkit for assessing TeachEngineering’s programming will assist the project with documenting and sharing best practices. This three-year initiative, Teach Engineering: Expanding the democratization of engineering education through increased partnerships and professional development, is housed at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). TeachEngineering (TE) is the largest repository for K12 engineering lessons, activities, and teacher resources available for free in the U. S. The project’s three overarching goals are to: 1) expand curricular reach, 2) dramatically increase teacher preparedness, and 3) enhance library content. NCWIT will leverage new and existing partnerships to reach both formal and informal educators with TE content and professional development. By partnering with national collaboratives such as the NSF-funded Broadening Participation in Computing Alliances, the Department of Defense (DoD) STEM Consortium, and the STEM Ecosystems Community of Practice and K-12 and Higher Education Alliances and internal programs (i.e., Counselors for Computing [C4C] and Aspirations in Computing [AiC]), an expanded network of new constituents can become aware of and use this unique engineering education repository of resources and professional development. Creating new programs that encompass in-person, virtual, and asynchronous options with research-based best practices will ensure the PD is culturally relevant and includes materials that encourage the inclusion of students from all backgrounds. NCWIT’s research-based Engagement Practices Framework, a compilation of research-based pedagogical and curricular practices, can help teachers engage all students, particularly those who may be underserved or underrepresented in engineering and other STEM fields. Through these activities, TeachEngineering will be better able to meet its goal of democratizing engineering education and creating lifelong STEM opportunities for all youth by reaching educators across the nation, in both well-off and struggling schools, with free, design-focused, standards-aligned, hands-on engineering activities that rely upon readily available, inexpensive, simple materials. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

Emerging polymer technologies include biogels, purification membranes, recyclable plastics, and advanced composites. However, progress in these areas is hindered by insufficient tooling for preparing and analyzing polymer simulations. This work leverages expertise in high-throughput computing, polymer physics, reaction dynamics, and scientific software development to enable efficient, reproducible modeling across multiple simulation engines and hardware architectures. The scientific and software needs of universities, national labs (NREL, LLNL, INL, NIST, AFRL), industry (Boeing, Bristol Myers Squibb) and international consortia (CECAM, FairMAT) are incorporated to maximize impact. The Multiscale Polymer Toolkit (MuPT) enables reproducible and extensible computational research on reacting polymer materials from Angström to micron length scales. MuPT is an expanding suite of Python software libraries and community recipes, built on top of an ecosystem of previously funded open-source tools. The effort pairs Open Molecular Software Foundation software developers with domain experts to develop software and tutorials in collaboration with application scientists in the community. Findability and accessibility are accomplished through conda-forge deployment and public workshops. MuPT deliverables include: (a) A multiscale, internal software representation for polymers that enables data conversion between major simulation engines at the same resolution scale, and tools for conversion between coarse-grained and higher resolution representations; (b) An interface for this representation that allows researchers to plug in existing software tools for polymer parameterization, building, and crosslinking; (c) A workflow interface that allows linking of existing software tools and enables users to programmatically generate simulation inputs by specifying the simulation engine, chemistries, reaction models, and molecular representations; (d) A searchable repository of community-vetted polymer simulation workflows, initially seeded and maintained by the principal investigators of the grant; (e) Documentation for best practice in polymer modeling with examples using MuPT libraries; (f) Improved materials and recommendations for training research software engineers. This award by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Division of Materials Research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program, this project aims to serve the national interest in high quality STEM teaching by examining how to teach genetics to undergraduate students in a more socially responsible manner. Genes are important for determining the characteristics and features of living things, including humans. For example, genes are important in a person's physical appearance, regulating things such as height, eye color, and skin tone. Genes are also important in characteristics such as susceptibility to particular diseases. However, such characteristics are not simply caused by a single gene working alone. Instead, almost all characteristics result from the effects of many genes working together and with conditions in the person's environment. Since many elements may influence such characteristics, scientists describe them as multifactorial traits, or multifactorial genetics. Genetic determinism is the idea that human actions and traits are caused primarily or exclusively by genes and are little influenced by anything else. Although the science of genetics long ago repudiated genetic determinism, belief in it is socially widespread and educationally problematic due to its relationship with racial and gender disparities in STEM education. Overestimation of the role that genes play in shaping complex human traits leads to an underestimation of a person’s abilities to change because the genetic basis of such abilities is believed to make them immutable. When undergraduates develop the belief that personality is unchangeable they can become less willing to confront individuals who stereotype others because of their race or gender. When individuals from underrepresented groups take undergraduate courses in STEM fields where they themselves or those around them believe that academic ability is inherited, it can decrease their grades in those courses and their motivations to pursue further education in those fields. Recent research in genetics education suggests that the genetics curriculum influences student belief in genetic determinism. Understanding how belief in genetic determinism changes in response to the content undergraduates learn in their genetics courses could therefore help educators understand how to design a better genetics education— one that helps students understand genetic inheritance without increasing gene-determinist beliefs. This project will develop several undergraduate genetics education interventions that teach students about a variety of genetics concepts. These interventions will be tested through experiments in multiple undergraduate courses to understand how they influence belief in genetic determinism, beliefs about the malleability of human traits, and motivations to study STEM and to confront prejudice. By comparing the results of the experiments with qualitative studies that explore how undergraduates reason with the intervention materials, this project will develop new knowledge about how belief in genetic determism develops during genetics education and how the genetics curriculum can be redesigned to reduce the prevalence of this belief. This project will conduct three large-scale randomized control trials (RCTs) with undergraduates at multiple institutions to explore the social-cognitive effects of learning about specific genomics concepts. These RCTs will be supplemented with cognitive think-aloud interviews that will explore the domain-specific knowledge and experiences that undergraduates use to make sense of genomics concepts. The study hopes to address to what extent multifactorial genetics education affects undergraduate beliefs in genetic determinism, implicit person theories, and the motivation to study science. The study also hopes to identify which multifactorial concepts produce the largest effect on these variables and which factors mediate the relationship between multifactorial genetics education and belief in genetic determinism. Additional studies hope to address the significance, reproducibility, and robustness of the results. The mixed-methods approach intends to advance understanding of the social-cognitive mechanisms linking the content of the genetics curriculum to belief in genetic determinsm and the extent to which genetics education influences undergraduates’ STEM-related motivations through its impacts on their social cognition. This knowledge may help college biology faculty understand how their genetics curriculum affects interest in STEM fields among underrepresented groups. THE NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program supports project to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

The implementation of active learning approaches in STEM undergraduate courses has significantly increased over the past few decades. Classrooms traditionally dominated by lectures have been reworked into environments where students actively participate in discussions, problem-solving, group work, and hands-on projects. Improvement in students' overall academic achievement in these environments has consistently been reported, but researchers have found that some students encounter barriers that significantly limit their participation and impact their learning experiences in these courses. Understanding these obstacles and how these students interact with peers and instructors in small-group settings is crucial for developing more effective educational practices. Despite this need, no rigorous studies have yet examined these interactions in undergraduate mathematics classrooms. Addressing this research gap is crucial for the STEM curriculum, considering the pivotal role these courses play in the STEM pipeline and their strong impact on student retention in STEM disciplines. This project will use surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to conduct a thorough analysis of the interactions among students working in small groups in undergraduate mathematics classrooms. This analysis will provide foundational knowledge about the relationship between active learning instruction and effective learning environments that engage all students. The primary goal of the research is to explore the experience of students and instructors during group activities in these classrooms; closely analyzing their interactions and characterizing learning opportunities (OtLs) within groups. The project team will work with instructors who incorporate teaching practices focused on fostering the engagement of all students in the context of teaching semester-long introductory undergraduate mathematics courses. Specifically, the research will examine the extent to which moving into more central roles of participation is available to all students within small-group social ecologies, carefully attending to the influence of classroom norms and belonging-oriented instruction on these participation shifts. The analysis will center on group interactions and OtLs before, during, and after the participation of instructors in coaching and professional learning opportunities focused on social ecologies and promoting students’ sense of belonging in mathematics. The research will be conducted at two institutions serving different regions of the United States, both of which have had a sustained commitment to active learning in introductory mathematics. The use of two sites will enable the exploration of how OtLs may vary among students in different institutional contexts with established instructional practices. The project will aim to capture comprehensive rich data on students' and instructors’ perceptions of group interactions through surveys, interviews, and classroom observations centered on small groups. The project will seek to provide four major contributions to STEM education research. First, is to advance foundational knowledge about the relationship between active learning instructional approaches and effective learning environments that engage all students. Second, is to broaden explanatory knowledge about students’ OTLs and experiences of belonging in active learning undergraduate mathematics classrooms. Third, is to increase understanding of how students experience sociohistorical and socio-mathematical classroom norms, and how those experiences are associated with OtLs. Fourth, and finally, is to extend core understanding of instructional practices that support effective learning environments in undergraduate mathematics classes. This project is supported by NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring: STEM learning and STEM learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

Smart textiles, fabrics with electronic or responsive material embedded into their structures, are highly useful for applications in soft robotics, medical monitoring, aerospace, and architecture, with a forecasted market of USD $15 billion by 2030. This project tackles the sustainability concerns that this growth poses because smart textiles will combine two of the world's largest waste-streams: textile waste and electronic waste. Prior research has revealed the potential of working with biomaterials—materials derived from or produced by biological organisms—to create custom sustainable materials that can also conduct electricity, change shape, dissolve, and readily biodegrade. This project will create a pathway for integrating biologically-inspired design (biodesign) into smart textiles research with the goal of addressing sustainability challenges in the smart textiles landscape. Specifically, the research team will study the potential for sustainable innovation that emerges when biomaterials can be spun into fibers—the backbone of all textiles—with custom properties such as crimp, cross-sectional shape, and length. By unlocking fiber-level design with biomaterials, this project seeks to enable smart textile innovators to fine-tune materials for performance while foregrounding sustainability considerations such as material recyclability and compostability. This project will foster sustainable smart textiles innovation by iteratively designing and studying a desktop system for spinning biofibers, fibers made from biomaterials. The iterative design and evaluation of this fabrication pipeline, alongside collaboration with smart textiles innovators (artists-in-residence, community members, students, and subject-matter experts) will generate insights into biofiber design and uncover new applications in the domain of sustainable smart textiles. To further illustrate the potential impact that the research team envisions from biofibers, this project will also examine the challenge of generating sustainable textile alternatives to single-use electronics. The research outcomes will include an open-source system (hardware and software) for biofiber production; a set of resources for producing sustainable single-use smart textiles; and a set of design strategies for supporting smart textiles innovators as they venture into this underexplored design space. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

Genetic essentialism is the belief that people of the same race share genes that make them physically, cognitively, and behaviorally uniform, and thus different from other races. The project will refine a genetics education curriculum, called Humane Genome Literacy (HGL), in order to reduce belief in genetic essentialism. This research will provide curriculum writers and educators with knowledge about how to design a humane genetics education to maximize reductions in students’ genetic essentialist beliefs and minimize the threat of backfiring (unintentionally increasing belief in essentialism). The research findings will demonstrate how to support teachers who wish to reduce beliefs in genetic essentialism by teaching students about the complexity of human genetics research using the HGL learning materials. Project research findings, learning materials, and professional development institutes will be made available to educators and researchers across the country who desire to teach genetics to reduce racial prejudice. To prepare for the research, the project will revise and augment the project’s existing HGL curriculum and professional development institutes. In year one, the project will develop new versions of the HGL interventions. Using these materials, the project will train teachers to implement new versions of the HGL interventions in their classrooms. Researchers will video and audio record a sample of teachers and students as they learn. These data will be analyzed qualitatively to: (1) examine how the conceptual change of genetic essentialism was promoted or impeded by interactions between teachers, students, and the materials; and (2) identify and corroborate general factors undergirding the backfiring effect. Knowledge constructed through these studies will be used to revise the HGL interventions and PDIs. In year three, using the revised versions of the HGL intervention, the project will conduct a cluster randomized trial (CRT). The CRT will compare the HGL interventions to a well-defined “business as usual” genetics curriculum, using a statistically powerful and geographically diverse sample (N = 135 teachers, N = 16,200 students, from 33 states). Using data from the CRT, the project will identify classrooms where the interventions reduced essentialism, had no effect on it, and where it backfired. Then, the project will use stimulated recall methods to interview the teachers and students in those classrooms to make sense of factors that contributed to these outcomes. The project will use this information to develop the final version of the HGL interventions and PDI materials. By the end of year four, the project will have trained an additional 90-100 teachers to use HGL interventions, reaching an additional 10,800-12,000 students, in at least 33 different states. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

Recent research suggests that learning about genetics during high school biology can lead to a belief that inherent differences in the genes and brains of men and women are the main causes of gender differences in behavior and intellectual abilities (a belief known as neurogenetic essentialism). This belief is implicated in lowering girls’ sense of their own STEM abilities, their feelings of belonging in STEM classes, and their interest in pursuing further education in STEM fields. The goal of this project, led by a team of researchers at Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, the University of Texas, Austin, and New York University is to answer important questions about how to teach genetics at the high school level in a manner that is scientifically accurate, but does not have these detrimental side effects. Specifically, this new line of experimental research will identify—and revise—the content in common genetics instruction that promotes the belief in neurogenetic essentialism. The proposed experiments will also explore how the beliefs of peers and teachers contribute to changes in such beliefs in students. This work has further implications for how the topic of differences between men and women is addressed during high school biology education. Furthermore, the research findings will advance theory on factors that contribute to gender disparities in STEM attitudes and aspirations. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances the fundamental research literature on STEM learning, with co-funding by the Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK12) program. Building on preliminary evidence, this project aims to accomplish four key goals. First, the project will study which specific aspects of genetics instruction affect students’ beliefs in neurogenetic essentialism. Second, the project will identify the cognitive mechanisms through which these effects occur. Third, the project will uncover the downstream effects of revised genetics instructional materials on a broad range of motivational variables relevant to STEM pursuit, such as implicit person theories, sense of belonging in STEM, and interest in this domain. Fourth, the project will explore the contextual factors (e.g., teacher and peer beliefs) that may moderate or mediate how students respond to the instructional materials. The research team will develop and iteratively refine genetics educational materialsthat teach about genetic, neurological, and behavioral variation within and between sexes, as well as the social causes of such differences. The research team will then test the effectiveness of these revised materials through two large-scale randomized control trials, one targeting students directly and one targeting students’ learning via their teachers. The results of this project will produce generalizable knowledge regarding the cognitive, sociological, and educational factors that contribute to STEM gender disparities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

This project supports the International Project Office (IPO) of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) project. IGAC aims to facilitate international scientific collaborations, cultivate the next generation of atmospheric scientists, build capacity for atmospheric research globally and in under-studied regions, and foster a cohesive international community of atmospheric scientists working together across disciplines and geographical boundaries to address global environmental change and sustainability issues. IGAC continues to be sponsored by iCACGP and is now a Global Research Project under the umbrella of Future Earth. IGAC is a tremendously effective organization for connecting the global atmospheric chemistry community, both scientifically and with regards to building community. IGAC provides a framework for scientific experts to convene at the international level, identify knowledge gaps, and organize strategies to address them through topical activities that evolve with the state of knowledge. Current and proposed activities include the following: creating a forum to build common awareness on issues of regional and global interest; sponsoring science-focused activities organized and led from the bottom up; scoping, synthesis, and review articles; creating, managing, and supporting regional or project-based working groups; providing a vision on knowledge gaps; initiating workshops to tackle key challenges as they emerge; and advocating for balance across all fields of science necessary to achieve a better understanding of atmospheric chemistry. A new activity for IGAC this year involves engaging society in these issues. The IGAC IPO is also supported by NASA and NOAA. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Data literacy is the ability to ask questions, analyze, interpret, and draw conclusions from data. As the world and the workplace become more data-driven, students need to have stronger data literacy across multiple disciplines, including science. This project uses an instructional framework, Data Puzzles, to investigate how to support middle grades teachers learning to include data literacy in their science teaching. Data Puzzles integrate mathematical and computational thinking with ambitious science teaching instructional practices and contemporary science topics. Students engaging with Data Puzzles resources can analyze real-world climate science data using web-based data analysis tools to make sense of science phenomena and develop data literacy. An emphasis across topics is on how uncertainty influences data analyses and the strategies and tools used to make sense of data. Teachers in the project will learn about data literacy, data analysis and data science tools, and how to integrate them with science content. The project builds on prior work to design the Data Puzzles instructional framework to develop teacher professional learning resources and models for supporting data literacy and sense making. A primary goal is helping teachers to learn how to confidently integrate data literacy and sensemaking in science teaching. The design-based research study includes mixed methods data to document the professional learning experience and students’ experience using the modules in classrooms. The study of teacher learning includes self-efficacy and teaching vision surveys, video of professional learning sessions, artifacts, and interviews. The study of students’ learning includes interviews and surveys with students. The project will develop resources for teacher and student learning that can be shared with researchers and educators. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) is an applied research program that seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for funded projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

National priorities to broaden participation in computer science require exposure to rich computing activities in elementary school. This will enable students to successfully navigate a computer infused world or envision themselves as future computer scientists. Currently, the scarcity of experienced computing teachers at the elementary level and a lack of coherent computing curricula that supports incremental knowledge building can hinder this growth. This situation restricts the opportunities for teachers to connect, collaborate, and support each other in fostering a robust computing education within the school district and beyond. This project aims to establish and study a new Research Practice Partnership between the University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado School of Mines, and the Aurora Public Schools to address these issues in one of Colorado’s most racially and linguistically diverse districts. This new Research Practice Partnership (RPP) project is focused on fostering the success of computing educators at the elementary level. These educators will collaborate with researchers and district administrators to adapt proven middle school physical computing lessons using the Micro:bit, making them accessible and engaging for elementary students. The Micro:bit enables students to create tangible computing projects that bring code to life in the physical world. In partnership with homeroom teachers, the team will develop follow-on lessons that align with students' interests, highlighting the relevance of computing throughout their educational journey. The research goals of this project are 1) to understand how participation in this cohort influences elementary STEM teacher capacity to teach computing concepts and their sense of belonging as computing educators both within the district and community at large and 2) to explore how the creation of this new Research Practice Partnership supports the integration of computing into elementary classrooms. Ultimately, this program aims to nurture a community of computing educators who are confident, capable, and passionate about supporting elementary students to discover the world of computing and become leaders in computing education within the district. Our research addresses two critical needs in computing education: the shortage of elementary computing teachers and the lack of a coherent, incremental student experience in elementary computing. The main research questions driving the study are 1) How do the co-design processes and routines develop elementary STEM teachers’ capacity to teach computing concepts and practices and their sense of belonging as computing educators? and 2) How do the proposed RPP partnership-building mechanisms help support the integration of computing into upper elementary classrooms? A design-based implementation research approach will be employed, interleaving co-design workshops, classroom implementations, and systematic data collection and analysis to investigate the research questions. Data will include pre-post identity and belonging surveys, video and artifacts from co-design workshops, reflective memos, exit tickets, and classroom observations. Over two years, the project will serve four elementary STEM teachers, four upper elementary homeroom teachers, and over 1000 upper elementary students. The project will produce two exemplar units that demonstrate how the storyline instructional model can effectively support elementary computing. A storyline is a sequence of lessons organized around student-generated questions from an anchoring phenomenon, promoting coherent, incremental knowledge building. This approach is designed to ensure that students understand how their current activities relate to previous and future lessons. Preliminary evidence will highlight the promise and feasibility of these units in engaging diverse elementary students in computing and fostering STEM interests. Additionally, the project aims to increase teachers' capacity to support students in computationally rich STEM investigations, creating a budding cohort of teacher leaders. Moreover, the project will provide a valuable case study on RPP formation using a recently developed framework, offering insights and best practices for the broader computing educational research community and helping ensure that the research-practice partnership between CU Boulder, Colorado School of Mines, and Aurora Public Schools matures and is ready for scale-up in future work. Resulting curricula, supports, and research findings will be shared with the district, and nationally with researchers and teachers via two high-traffic websites—OpenSciEd and Micro:bit Educational Foundation—and relevant conferences. This project is funded through the Computer Science for All: Research and Research Practice Partnership (RPP) program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. Society expects school infrastructure to be safe and to protect children. Yet, the infrastructure of schools can be vulnerable to acute hazards such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and to chronic hazards such as mold and inadequate ventilation. These hazards can make school infrastructure unsafe and adversely affect children's health, school attendance, learning, and future prosperity. These risks disproportionally affect children in lower-income and minority groups. This SAI research project converges community, engineering, and scientific knowledge to assess vulnerabilities, mitigation strategies, and mechanisms for empowering stakeholders to take action to strengthen school infrastructure and, thus, improve safety. The project focuses on Puerto Rico, but recognizes that schools in many areas deal with similar challenges. This project aims to transform how society addresses school infrastructure safety by studying community co-production of infrastructure knowledge, conducting engineering and policy assessments, and investigating engineering mitigation and policy solutions. To do so, this project centers community knowledge and action by first convening stakeholder groups to determine community perceptions of school vulnerabilities and safety. These community-identified perceptions drive the project’s new locally-driven engineering and scientific analyses, which are used to assess risks to school safety and to propose effective and cost-appropriate mitigation interventions. In parallel, the project is developing recommendations on opportunities for policy interventions aimed at strengthening school infrastructure. These efforts produce assessments of threats to school infrastructure, demonstrate community-specific solutions, and identify new opportunities for school infrastructure safety policies. This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Engineering. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Non-Technical Abstract: This project explores the areas or crash-zones where floating ice shelves in Antarctica compressively flow against obstructions such as islands and plugs of stagnant ice frozen to the sea bed. The significance of these crash-zones is that they are responsible for generating the resistive forces that allow ice shelves to slow down the flow of ice farther inland into the ocean. Ice conditions within these boundaries thus determine how Antarctica’s ice sheets contribute to sea-level rise. The research will feature on-the-ice glaciological and geophysical field measurements near pressure ridges near Scott Base and the transition to the ice road where large wave-like pressure ridges form on the ice-shelf surface. This field area is along the coast of Ross Island adjacent to major logistical stations of the US and New Zealand Antarctic programs. Thus the research will help station managers better preserve one of the key roadways that connects the stations to the major runway used to fly to virtually all other parts of Antarctica. The research will also interact with educational programs such as featured in the long-standing Juneau Icefield Research Project as well as potential involvement of an artist from the US Antarctic Program’s Polar STEAM in the second field season. Technical Abstract: This project explores the dynamics of boundaries where ice shelves compressively flow against obstructions such as islands and areas of grounded ice. The significance of these boundaries is that they are responsible for generating the resistive forces that allow ice shelves to impede or slow down the flow of grounded inland ice into the ocean. Ice conditions within these boundaries thus determine how Antarctica’s ice sheets contribute to sea-level rise. The research will feature glaciological and geophysical field surveys in a compressive boundary area near pressure ridges adjacent to Scott Base and the transition to the ice road along the coast of Ross Island, an area affecting access to major logistical hubs of the US and New Zealand Antarctic programs. Field data will be combined with remote sensing, numerical modeling and theory development to answer key questions about the dynamics of compressive boundaries such as: is there a limit to compressive stress due to ice fracture and the bending of the ice shelf into sinusoidal pressure ridges? Over what time scales does this compressive stress build, fluctuate and decay, and how is it related to the processes that form rumples? Are there ways in which the ridges actually protect the compressive boundary from damage such as by setting up a means to scatter ocean swell impinging from the open ocean? How should compressive ice-shelf boundaries be represented in large scale ice-sheet/shelf models for the prediction of future sea-level rise? A variety of broader impact work will be done both specifically targeting the research field area and more broadly addressing scientific and societal concerns. The field area contains a critical logistics roadway that connects McMurdo Station, Scott Base and a runway essential for continent-wide air logistics. The project will inform how to stabilize the roadway against excessive damage from summer ablation and other factors. Other broader impacts include: (a) Open-Science evaluation of climate systems engineering strategies for glacial geoengineering mitigation of sea-level rise, (b) cooperation with the Juneau Icefield Research Program (JIRP) education component, (c) support and facilitation of an online FieldSafe workshop and associated panel discussion to support early-career Antarctic field teams to mitigate environmental and interpersonal risks in remote field sites, and (d) potential involvement of an artist from the US Antarctic Program’s Polar STEAM in the second field season. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

This EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award is made in response to Dear Colleague Letter 23-109, as part of the NSF-wide Clean Energy Technology initiative. Harvesting the vast energy content in waste heat generated by U.S. industry, which accounts for two thirds of the total US energy consumption, is a major technological barrier in clean energy technology. Utilizing waste heat is a promising option to improve industrial energy efficiency with thermal processes for heavy-emission industries such as cement, iron, steel, and glassmaking. Solid-state thermal energy conversion technologies, such as thermoelectrics (TE) and thermophotovoltaics (TPV), could improve energy efficiency and accelerate decarbonization in numerous industries. However, these technologies have not been widely deployed due to fundamental constraints on efficiency or attainable power density. In this collaborative Clean Energy Technology EAGER project, Prof. Longji Cui (University of Colorado Boulder) and Prof. Eric Tervo (University of Wisconsin-Madison) explore the fundamental operational mechanisms of a novel solid-state energy conversion concept for waste heat recovery, called zero-gap thermophotovoltaics (zTPV). The outcomes of this project can address the bottlenecks in existing solid-state thermal energy technologies, increase the uptake of heat conversion technology in many industrial processes, and inspire further fundamental study in a broad range of relevant physics and power conversion mechanisms such as thermophotonics and infrared sensing. This project also focuses on the training of a diverse new generation of mechanical and electrical engineers to pursue broader career opportunities in renewable, thermal, and semiconductor industries, which helps to address the workforce shortage in the US in these areas. The principal investigators establish a comprehensive and predictive framework for zTPV through combined thermal and optoelectronic transport modelling and demonstrate the zTPV concept through fabrication and experiment. Additionally, they evaluate opportunities for critical material re-use and recycling. zTPV is fundamentally different from the existing TE and TPV methods and could lead to significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Wisconsin-Madison develop a detailed theory and leverage it to provide quantitative predictions on device architecture, materials, and power generation. They also plan first-of-a-kind proof-of-concept experiments on the potentially disruptive zTPV concepts which could demonstrate the predicted orders of magnitude power enhancement capability over both of its far-field and near-field counterparts. The deep insights from this research into the fundamental limits to energy conversion by zTPV could profoundly impact the fields of solar-thermal conversion paired with moderate-temperature thermal storage, combined heat-and-power, and primary energy conversion with clean combustion processes such as hydrogen. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

The science of ultracold atoms and molecules is vigorously pursued for applications to both fundamental physics, such as searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, and for technology, such as quantum computing. Underlying these applications is the basic fact that the samples produced, typically still gaseous even at temperatures just above absolute zero, represent a new kind of physical substance. For example, imagine a gas, quite unlike ordinary air, where sound travels at different speeds in different directions, and where this dependence can be controlled on a whim. Though esoteric, this system has the potential to teach us new ways of looking to more familiar fluids. A second novel feature of these gases is “sticky collisions,” where molecules do not simply bounce off one another as one usually expects, but rather can become entangled in an intricate dance. These collisions are on the one hand disruptive to experiments, and must be understood in order to make progress in the field. But more fundamentally, they may have much to tell us about the relation between quantum mechanics, which holds on the scale of atoms, and classical mechanics, which describes the world we are more familiar with. This connection has puzzled physicists for over a century. Searching for novel answers to these fundamental questions will train the students involved to creatively tackle difficult, novel problems, skills which they will apply in many future endeavors. Specifically, the research will develop and solve the equations of fluid motion for an ultracold gas of polar molecules, which can be aligned in a laboratory frame by means of external electric fields. The resulting fluid equations are familiar as the Navier-Stokes equations, with the caveat that the coefficients of thermal conductivity and viscosity are anisotropic. The work will investigate novelties of this anisotropy in realistic experimental conditions. For example, one can envision stirring the fluid to excite vortical motion, then to investigate the effects of anisotropy on the transition to turbulent dynamics. In a second effort, the research will investigate collisions of atoms and molecules that possess dense, complex resonance structures. These can be approached semi-classically owing to the relatively high kinetic energy during the collision. But this approach can be complemented by a search for the most appropriate approximate quantum numbers that identify the different resonant states. In either case, one searches for the appropriate description that best represents the situation, trying to pry some degree of order from the apparent chaos. Insights gained from these highly-controlled ultracold systems will then carry over to other areas of complex systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Continental-scale ice sheets in the polar regions (i.e., Antarctica and Greenland) hold 99 percent of the fresh water on Earth. These ice sheets are prone to undergoing fast changes in a shifting climate and may contribute significantly to future sea level rise. The physical properties of the ice sheets contain important information that can aid understanding of ice sheet dynamics (why they move) and provide hints on how ice sheets themselves respond to the changing climate. Therefore, making comprehensive observations of the time-dependent physical properties of the ice sheets is critical to better predict how much and how fast these systems will contribute to sea level rise. By leveraging existing seismic data, this project will aid the understanding of how seismic properties within and beneath the ice sheets change over time. Seasonal changes in subglacial conditions, revealed by seismic energy from remote earthquakes and ambient noise, are directly related to the evolution of subglacial hydrological systems. Targets of the research include near-surface seismic properties, which will reveal possible changes within and local conditions of the firn, a shallow layer used to understand long-term trends and improve regional climate models. Results from Antarctica will be compared to those from the Greenland ice sheet to isolate true seasonal signatures in the response of ice sheets in northern and southern polar regions to seasonal atmospheric and climate forcing. Further, sub-glacial solid Earth properties help constrain the geology of the ice-covered continent. In addition to the research efforts, the project will support a female graduate student, a female scientist and an early career (non-tenured) faculty, with additional educational efforts catering to the needs of K-12 and undergraduate students. Seismic properties within and beneath Antarctic ice sheets reflect physical changes in firn and subglacial hydrological systems and thus contain information on how the ice sheets are changing now and may change in the future. Seismic ambient noise and teleseismic wave measurements display geographical and temporal variations of near-surface and deeper properties, described to date in polar regions such as Greenland. A systematic survey of temporal variations has not yet been performed across all of Antarctica. Preliminary findings suggest seasonal variations in seismic observations (e.g., up to ±20% annual shear velocity change), and initial comparisons between sensors and hemispheres suggest true physical changes within the ice sheet and at its base are being detected. This project will perform a comprehensive analysis of seismic data collected by more than 600 stations in Antarctica over the past two decades, focusing on seasonal and long-term temporal changes recorded in various data products from both body and surface waves. This project will investigate: 1) Body-wave receiver function waveform analysis and their vertical-to-horizontal initial amplitude ratio, a novel approach to investigate shear velocity in the top few meters to several km; 2) Surface wave analysis (horizontal-to-vertical ratios method using both ambient noise and teleseismic earthquakes); and 3) Ambient noise coda, which helps characterize subglacial hydrological systems. Notably, the first two measurements (horizontal-to-vertical ratios and radio-frequency amplitudes) will be incorporated in a novel method to constrain temporal changes in the top tens of meters of the ice sheet down to tens of kilometers depth, resolving the ice sheet base and crust below. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Researchers working in computer, information, and data science regularly extract huge amounts of data from online platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit to study people and their activities. We call this pervasive data—rich information generated about people through their digital interactions with social and mobile media, wearables, and more. Pervasive data spans multiple domains of people’s lives and is often gathered through digital interactions hidden from end users’ full awareness. Notably, the collection and use of pervasive data often does not fall into the category of “human subjects research,” meaning it is often not overseen by university ethics review boards. This leaves researchers on their own to make decisions about appropriate data collection, storage, sharing, and analysis practices. At the same time, many researchers have not received much—if any—training on how to address ethical questions related to these practices. The collaborative project “Developing Educational Resources for the Ethical Use of Pervasive Data” addresses these issues in two phases. In Phase 1, the research team will survey and interview current computing students and junior researchers at US universities, and complete a systematic evaluation of existing computing and Responsible Conduct of Research (RECR) programs. Goals of Phase 1 are to identify current practices, challenges, and opportunities for developing ethics training that address the unique issues with using pervasive data. Phase 2 builds on these findings. The research team will develop and evaluate various curricular materials, tools, and resources to support research ethics training, including (1) adapting a previously developed ethical decision-making tool, (2) creating training materials for students and junior researchers, and (3) developing "train the trainer" modules to help more-experienced researchers confidently mentor others in pervasive data ethics. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its potential to enhance research ethics education by creating innovative teaching materials based on case studies and interactive modules. It aims to integrate content on ethics and responsible computing into broader coursework and contribute to the field of data and research ethics by addressing knowledge gaps among computing students. The broader impact of the project includes promoting ethical awareness and responsible research practices among students and researchers. The project will disseminate its resources widely to computing educators, students, university programs, and other stakeholders through various channels, including a project website, social media, and webinars. This project is funded through the ER2 program by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

This research team will study galaxies that just recently shut down their last burst of star formation, transforming from youthful active galaxies like our own Milky Way into sedate galaxies that age in place. While this process normally takes billions of years, the team has developed methods to find galaxies that experienced a rapid cutoff in star formation. The project will further develop these methods and use a wide set of data from telescopes around the world to understand why galaxies do (or don't) rapidly quench star formation. The program will support research experiences for undergraduate students at both Texas A&M University and the University of Colorado Boulder. Using novel modeling methods, the team has developed for large ground-based spectroscopic surveys, hundreds of massive galaxies that quenched their star formation within the last billion years have been discovered. The team will use an extensive multi-wavelength dataset for about 50 of these post-starburst galaxies to measure dust and cold gas masses, assess the incidence of active galactic nuclei, and measure obscured star formation. The team will also extend the selection methods to identify galaxies that quenched on slower timescales, which become increasingly prevalent at low redshifts. In addition, the team will expand existing research support programs for undergraduate students to include community building and skill-sharing exercises. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.