ESI’s Seed Grant program brings together faculty from all five schools at MIT for transformative research in the environment. A total of 59 teams of faculty, research staff and students responded to the first call for proposals, from which nine winners were announced on March 13, 2015:

2015 Seed Grant Winners

SUSTAINABILITY

Fostering Sustainable Consumption in U.S. Cities
PI: Eran Ben-Joseph (Urban Studies & Planning)
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Improved Management of Common Pool Resources
PIs: Dennis McLaughlin (Civil & Environmental Engineering), Parag Pathak (Economics)
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METALS & MINING

Metals and Minerals for the Environment
PIs: Antoine Allanore (Materials Science & Engineering), T. Alan Hatton (Chemical Engineering)
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Digging Deep: An Integrated Approach for Assessing the Impacts of Deep-sea Mining
PIs: Thomas Peacock and Pierre Lermusiaux (Mechanical Engineering), Glenn Flierl (Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences)
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Developing Solutions for Human and Environmental Health Risks Created by Exponentially Increasing Exposures to Lanthanide Metals
PIs: John Essigmann (Biological Engineering and Chemistry), Bevin Engelward (Biological Engineering), Harold Hemond (Civil & Environmental Engineering)
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HEALTHY CITIES

Will New Limits on Coal use in China Reduce Toxic Air Pollutants across Asia?
PIs: Valerie Karplus (Sloan) and Noelle Selin (Engineering Systems Division and Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences)
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Clearer Skies in Beijing: Collecting and Interpreting Relevant Spatio-temporal Data for Air Quality Assessment
PIs: Marta Gonzalez (Civil & Environmental Engineering) and Jinhua Zhao (Urban Studies & Planning)
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CLIMATE/RISK/MITIGATION

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Tropical Peatlands: Biogeochemical Processes and Mitigation Strategies
PIs: Charles Harvey, Benjamin Kocar and Martin Polz (Civil & Environmental Engineering), Shuhei Ono and Roger Summons (Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences)
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Opportunities for Mitigating CH4 and other Non-CO2 energy-technology-related GHG Emissions
PIs: Jessica Trancik (Engineering Systems Division), Francis O’Sullivan (MIT Energy Initiative)
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Click here to read the Seed Grant RFP