Pennsylvania State University
AC-10: Support for Sustainability Research

Undergraduate research experiences in general are encouraged at Penn State, and there are a variety of ways that students with an interest in sustainability can get involved.

One way is through participation in externally sponsored research competitions, which are mentored by faculty. For example, since 2014 a Penn State student team has competed successfully in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Collegiate Wind Competition, placing 1st in 2021 and 2019, and 2nd in 2018 and 2020. https://www.energy.gov/eere/collegiatewindcompetition/collegiate-wind-competition-2021 https://wind.psu.edu/education/collegiate-wind-competition/wind-energy-club/cwc

Another example of a research competition is the Advanced Vehicle Team (AVT), an official student organization of Penn State. In the past, the team has participated in Advanced Vehicle Technology Competitions (AVTCs) hosted by the US Department of Energy and leaders in the automotive industry. These competitions challenge students, from a variety of disciplines, to re-engineer a donated production vehicle and implement innovative solutions to increase fuel economy and decrease emissions. https://www.hev.psu.edu/

Penn State also runs Drawdown Scholars, a summer research experience for undergraduates that focuses on strategies for reversing global warming. Participants work closely with Penn State faculty mentors and their graduate students. The program started in 2019 with over 50 undergraduate researchers for an 8-week residential summer program, continued in 2020 with 20 students mostly doing remote research for the summer, yielded 34 projects in 2021, continues to recruit students locally and nationally.
https://sites.psu.edu/drawdownscholars/2021/07/31/enabling-community-resilience-in-environmental-justice-ej-communities-2/

Consistent with the "living lab" concept, paid internships with a sustainability focus are offered by Penn State Sustainability, the Office of Physical Plant, and other operational units. These involve research on a sustainability topic. Student class projects through the Sustainable Communities Collaborative offer additional opportunities for sustainability research experience. See https://sustainability.psu.edu/programs/scc/ for more information.
Some examples of these living lab projects are described in credit AC-8. See
https://sustainability.psu.edu/academics/experiential-learning/living-labs/ for more information about Living Lab projects.

Contracts for sustainability-related projects and initiatives with external partners often stipulate funding for student projects. For example the terms of the 70-MW solar power purchase agreement with Lightsource bp provide funding for student research projects at the site. A smaller solar array at the edge of campus with developer AEDG is involving students in research to improve radiance measurement and measurements on units of solar energy being produced, making them more accurate for solar arrays across the world.

Penn State Sustainability established the Reinvention Fund in 2014 to provide seed grant funds to faculty and students for innovative sustainability projects. Since that initial stimulus, seed funding for sustainability research has been less centralized and more distributed, as the desire to encourage sustainability research has spread throughout the University's interdisciplinary research institutes and colleges.

Examples of seed grant programs over the past three years include:

- The Institutes for Energy and the Environment (IEE) runs annual seed grant competitions which support interdisciplinary research under their thematic foci - all of which have sustainability relevance: Climate and Ecosystem Change, Health and the Environment, Integrated Energy Systems, Urban Systems, and Water and Biogeochemical Cycles. In 2021-22, 80+ researchers from 11 colleges and 4 campuses were awarded funding for 21 projects. Historically, IEE seed grants have a 2.5:1 return on investment, have supported 150+ students supported, and resulted in 250+ scholarly publications or presentations related to IEE seed grants. https://iee.psu.edu/research

- the Materials Research (MRI) sponsors an annual seed grant competition with research themes that include "Sustainable Materials" and "Convergent Research At The Intersection Of Materials – Life – Health – Environment" that enable faculty to establish new collaborations with partners outside their own units for the exploration of transformative ideas for high-impact materials science and engineering. Grants are awarded by MRI in partnership with Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory, College of Medicine, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the Pennsylvania Recycling Markets Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

- The Social Science Research Institute provides grants for interdisciplinary research that include themes of The Human System, which explores how environments and experiences get under the skin to affect stress and immune functions, social, cognitive, and affective neural processes; and, Social Disparities, which focuses on the discovery of causes and consequences and development of evidence-based policies, programs, and practices for remediating widening gaps in the health, education, and community resources of vulnerable populations, including children, youth, elders, and their families—toward sustaining a diverse and changing population in a global society.
https://ssri.psu.edu/annual-report/2019-2021.htm

- the Smeal College of Business offers annual Sustainability Research Grants, with a maximum award of $10,000 for an individual project. Projects have included Estimating and Increasing the Demand for a Corporate Ridesharing Initiative in Brazil, How Social Unrest Triggers Corporate Diversity Actions: A Look at The Black Lives Matter Movement, How do meta-organizations build sustainable global supply chain networks? The Case of the Responsible Business Alliance, and Repair Services: Nudging Consumers to Repair Instead of Replace. https://www.smeal.psu.edu/sustainability/faculty-research/research-support

IEE: 53 interdisciplinary projects were funded over the past three years. 21-22 = 80+ researchers from the 11 colleges and 4 campuses were awarded funding for 21 projects; 20-21 = 22 projects; 19-20 = 22 projects.
Smeal: 11 projects funded between 2019-2021 for a total of $68,568
MRI: 18 projects

In addition, the Provost seed grant funding for projects aligned with the University's strategic plan in 2019, which includes Stewarding Our Planet's Resources as a thematic priority and Ensuring a Sustainable Future as a foundation. A number of sustainability-related projects received funding under this initiative, including "A Systems Approach for Meeting Local and Global Food-Energy-Water Nexus" and "Greening Our Stormwater" https://strategicplan.psu.edu/rfp/funded-initiatives/

In addition, Penn State Sustainability is currently sponsoring/hosting a faculty Scholar-in-Residence, whose role is to organize a research symposium on a selected sustainability topic (in 2021, Biodiversity) to encourage the formation of inter-/trans-disciplinary research teams. The symposium will be followed by a seed grant competition on the same topic.

In addition to these research funding opportunities, the structure of Penn State's research enterprise is set up to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, notably through its six interdisciplinary research institutes at the University Park campus. https://www.research.psu.edu/capabilities

Penn State's Administrative Guidelines for Promotion and Tenure state, under the heading of Assessing The Scholarship of Research and Creative Accomplishments, that: "It is expected that units encourage and support collaborative and interdisciplinary research and that units will develop methods to assess these activities." (see Part II,D on page 6)
https://www.vpfa.psu.edu/files/2019/07/2019-2020-Administrative-Guidelines-Final.pdf

The Penn State University Libraries provide access to a plethora of materials and searchable databases that support sustainability research including GreenFILE, Environment & Energy Newsletters, Ecology Abstracts, and many others.

The Penn State Research Database is a gateway to finding research output, collaboration partners and facilities throughout all Penn State campuses. Penn State research is organized according to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to make searching and highlighting research simpler. users can search profiles and output by concept, researcher name or department name, and view collaboration networks among scholars and experts both within and outside of Penn State.
https://pennstate.pure.elsevier.com/

Other examples of library resources can be found here:
https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/sustainable-development
http://psu.libguides.com/sustainableengineering
http://guides.libraries.psu.edu/energysustainpolicy