Yale Planetary Solutions seed grants nurture innovative projects campuswide

Yale Planetary Solutions (YPS), the university-wide initiative created to amplify and drive solutions to the world’s most urgent climate and environmental threats, has awarded more than $2 million in seed grants to 22 Yale-based research projects that hold promise to achieve transformative change.

Grants will support innovative research happening in schools, programs, and labs across the Yale campus and representing practically every field. Each project is interdisciplinary and designed to be implemented and to achieve impact, either through commercialization, education, community action, or by informing policy.

This year’s recipients — selected by a committee of faculty and staff members who themselves work on projects related to knowledge creation and implementation — were recognized in three themes: biodiversity and ecosystems; climate change; and communities and society.

Several of the projects address challenges related to carbon capture and utilization, an emerging class of systems that draw on natural processes to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the environment to mitigate the effects of climate change. Other projects receiving grants will utilize advances in artificial intelligence to achieve environmental gains, including new insights into ecological function of tropical forest species and improved fire management. Yet another is merging expertise in public health, computer technology, and music to nurture environmental stewardship among local school children.

“Across the Yale campus, researchers from nearly every field and discipline are seeking solutions to the great global threats of our time,” said Julie Zimmerman, the vice provost for planetary solutions. “But even those projects with the greatest potential can struggle to receive support simply because the ideas are so new, so novel.

“These seed grants offer our researchers the freedom to pursue their innovative ideas — with the aim to transform them into the kind of positive, scalable solutions that the world desperately needs.”

The competitive seed grant program, a signature initiative of Yale Planetary Solutions, is supported by the Three Cairns Climate Impact Innovation Fund, the Natural Carbon Solutions Fund, the Simon Bates Catalyst Fund, the Science Catalyst Fund for Planetary Solutions, the Gordon Data and Environmental Sciences Research Grants, and the Science Frontiers Endowment.

With seed grant support, this year’s awardees are: 

• creating an electrochemical process that can simultaneously capture carbon (from the air, seawater or other sources) and utilize it for new products such as carbon monoxide, a building block for many useful compounds;
• designing an AI-powered platform that utilizes a variety of data types — including satellite imagery, terrain models, social media, and weather maps — to help with wildfire detection, response, and rebuild planning;
• building an Arctic Climate Research Hub that convenes Yale researchers, Indigenous knowledge holders, Tribal nations, and native Alaskans to better understand the consequences of climate change on the region;
• investigating whether a new composite catalyst can yield carbon-neutral fuels;
• merging expertise from a range of disciplines to help local students translate scientific data — including on bird movements — into musical compositions and become better stewards of the land; and more.

Read more about each of the 2024 seed grant recipients.    

It is the third year that the program has awarded seed grants to interdisciplinary projects campuswide involving faculty and staff alike. To date, YPS has awarded more than $5.5 million in seed grants to over 200 faculty and staff from seven different schools and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and dozens of innovative projects from across the Yale community.

“These seed grant projects highlight the power of Yale’s capacity to convene experts from across campus and take action on climate and environmental challenges,” said Scott Strobel, university provost. “It’s been energizing to witness how knowledge produced by our faculty, students, and staff is translating into impact that could reach far beyond campus.”

The research projects supported during the first two rounds of seed grants are already yielding positive results and generating new knowledge. For example:

• A research project led by Yuan Yao and Robert Mendelsohn, both from the Yale School of the Environment (YSE), investigated the global land and carbon consequences of using cross-laminated-timber (CLT) as an alternative to steel and cement in construction, helping to combat climate change.
• An interdisciplinary collaboration developed by Kymberly Pinder, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, and Karen Seto, the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at YSE, created a public mural, in New Haven’s Fairhaven neighborhood, to raise awareness of the climate threat and inspire local action. A second mural is in the works.
• The Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative — a collaboration between Law, Ethics & Animals at Yale Law School, the Yale Peabody Museum, and the Yale Office of Sustainability — is working to accelerate the adoption of bird-friendly design on Yale’s campus and beyond.
• A team led by YSE’s Craig Brodersen (which received an additional grant award this year) has developed new processes to assess the drought-tolerance of a variety of crop varieties to help protect global food security and the potential application of archaeobotanical data to modern crop resilience strategies — and is now working with The Nature Conservancy to disseminate these new understandings to promote new agricultural practices.
• In an effort to improve the infrastructure for electric vehicles in the state of Connecticut, energy and environmental economist Kenneth Gillingham is working with the Department of Transportation (DOT) to identify optimal investments in charging stations statewide.

According to Gillingham, who received an additional seed grant this year, YPS support has enabled his team to pull together an unprecedented amount of data — on the location of charging stations, cell phone usage, use of charging stations, the zip code of electric vehicle and other vehicle adopters, and demographics.

“Due to the initial YPS seed grant, we have been able to bring together a phenomenal amount of data along with cutting-edge models to provide deeper insight into charging infrastructure build out than ever before,” said Gillingham, a professor of environmental & energy economics at YSE. “But equally important, by working directly with the Connecticut DOT we are making sure that our work is directly responsive to their highest priorities and thus will be as useful as possible to policymakers.”

Gillingham hopes that the work will also inspire similar work across the country.

The YPS seed grant program is but one piece of an ongoing effort “to catalyze all that Yale is, and all that Yale does in pursuit of planetary solutions,” Zimmerman said.

“These seed grant projects are an important part of Yale Planetary Solutions’ efforts to transform knowledge into action,” she said. “We hope they inspire others to engage in our work, which must be a collective effort. We call on faculty, students, and staff across campus — and partners around the world — to join us.”

The YPS seed grant program will put out a call for another round of proposals next semester. Learn more at the Yale Planetary Solutions website. Registration is also open for YPS’s four-day Yale @ Climate Week event in New York next month.