Summary of 2018 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards
Through the 2018 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards program, Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) and three of its sister science philanthropies funded a total of $2.9 million in seed funding for cutting-edge research on the topics: Advanced Energy Storage, Chemical Machinery of the Cell, Time Domain Astrophysics, and Molecules Come to Life.
The program was created in 2010 by RCSA, which oversees its administration. Scialog - which stands for "science dialogue" - funds early career scientists to pursue transformative research, in dialogue with their fellow grantees, on crucial issues of scientific inquiry. In 2018’s round of conferences, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Heisings-Simons Foundation contributed considerable funding to support Scialog collaborative projects.
Here is a breakdown of 2018 Scialog funding by conference topic:
Advanced Energy Storage
Goal: to catalyze theorists, computational scientists, and experimentalists across multiple disciplines to collaborate on developing new and innovative projects to accelerate fundamental science driving advances in energy storage.
Funded by the Sloan Foundation
Kah Chun Lau, physics, California State University, Northridge; Yuan Yang, physics, Columbia University; Tianbiao Leo Liu, chemistry, Utah State University, UT -- Water in Redox Active Ionic Liquid (WIL) Electrolytes for Energy Storage
Candace Chan, materials science and engineering, Arizona State University; Hui (Claire) Xiong, materials science and engineering, Boise State University; Anne C. Co, chemistry, Ohio State University -- Solid Electrolyte Interphase (SEI) “Skin Grafts”
Venkat Viswanathan, mechanical engineering, Carnegie Mellon University; Lauren E. Marbella, chemical engineering, Columbia University; Partha Mukherjee, mechanical engineering, Purdue University -- e-COBRA: eutectic Co-deposition Based Rechargeable Anodes
T $330,000
Funded by RCSA
Luisa L. Whittaker-Brooks, chemistry, University of Utah; Partha Mukherjee, mechanical engineering, Purdue University; Beth S. Guiton, chemistry, University of Kentucky -- Probing the Mechanistics of a Molecularly Tailored Solid/Solid Interface
Bryan McCloskey, chemical and biomolecular engineering, University of California, Berkeley; Louis Piper, physics, SUNY - Binghamton University -- Scaling the sensitivity gap to probe interfaces of high-voltage cathodes
Yuan Yang, physics, Columbia University; Shyue Ping Ong, nanoengineering, University of California, San Diego; Yan-Yan Hu, chemistry, Florida State University -- Solid Electrolytes with Entropy-Enhanced Ionic Conductivity and Stability for High-Energy-Density Lithium Batteries
T $330,002
Chemical Machinery of the Cell
Goal: To catalyze breakthroughs in developing our fundamental understanding of chemical processes in the living cell that will lead to a new era of advancement in cell biology.
Funded by the Moore Foundation
Juan R. Perilla, chemistry, University of Delaware; Gulcin Pekkurnaz, neurobiology, University of California, San Diego; Abhishek Chatterjee, chemistry, Boston College -- Finding Mitochondrial Memory
Gulcin Pekkurnaz, neurobiology, University of California, San Diego; Jennifer A. Prescher, chemistry, University of California, Irvine; Markita del Carpio Landry, chemical and biomolecular engineering, University of California, Berkeley -- Optical Mind Reading
Jing-Ke Weng, biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Alice Soragni, biochemistry, University of California - Los Angeles; Kathryn L. Haas, chemistry, Saint Mary's College -- A plant cell-based platform to target human proteostasis diseases
Jennifer M. Heemstra, chemistry, Emory University; Abhishek Singharoy, molecular sciences, Arizona State University - Tempe Campus; Kamil Godula, chemistry, University of California, San Diego -- What does “self” look like?
Lu Wei, chemistry, California Institute of Technology; Judith Su, optical sciences and biomedical engineering, University of Arizona --Understanding Biological Systems Using Resonator-Mediated Single-Molecule Raman Detection and Spectroscopy
David Limmer, chemistry, University of California, Berkeley; Christian Kaiser, biology, Johns Hopkins University; Rebecca Voorhees, other, California Institute of Technology -- Breaking the central dogma: Reverse translation of the proteome
T $956,250
Funded by RCSA
Joshua Widhalm, horticulture, Purdue University; Jing-Ke Weng, biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Markita del Carpio Landry, chemical and biomolecular engineering, University of California, Berkeley -- Synthetic organelle biology: Engineering photosynthetic animal cells
T $165,000
Time Domain Astrophysics
Goal: To accelerate our understanding of stars and their life-cycles, as well as to promote innovative projects based on new emerging datasets from Gaia and other space-based surveys that are likely to be disruptive for astrophysics.
Funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation
Timothy Brandt, physics, University of California, Santa Barbara; Jackie Faherty, astronomy, The American Museum of Natural History -- Acceleration Today: Finding, Weighing, and Characterizing New Degenerate Companions to Nearby Stars
Sergey Koposov, physics, Carnegie Mellon University; Joshua Peek, astronomy, Space Telescope Science Institute -- Data at Your Fingertips: A Real-Time Discovery Engine for Gaia
Kaitlin Kratter, physics, University of Arizona Foundation; Nicholas M. Law, physics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; James Fuller, physics, California Institute of Technology -- Quickening Heartbeats: Measuring Tidal Orbital Decay in Eccentric Young Binaries
Yue Shen, astronomy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Nadia Zakamska, physics, Johns Hopkins University -- Discovery of Sub-kpc Binary SMBHs from Gaia with Variability-Induced Astrometric Jitter
Gail Zasowski, physics, University of Utah; Carles Badenes, physics, University of Pittsburgh --Mapping Explosive Enrichment
T $550,000
Funded by RCSA
Keith Hawkins, astronomy, University of Texas at Austin; Gail Zasowski, physics, University of Utah, Kaitlin Kratter, astronomy, University of Arizona -- A Gaia-Enabled View of Chemical Homogeneity
Daniel Huber, astronomy, University of Hawaii; Melissa Ness, astronomy, Columbia University -- Expanding the Time-Domain Revolution: Stellar Parameters from Every Light Curve
T $220,000
2018 Molecules Come To Life – 2017 Second Year
Goal: To bring togetherearly career scientists from physics and biology interested in pursuing collaborative, high-risk, highly impactful discovery research on untested ideas in physical cell biology.
Funded by RCSA
Minsu Kim, physics, Emory University; Kirill S. Korolev, physics, Boston University -- The Evolutionary Dynamics of Temporal Division of Labor
Laura Lackner, molecular biosciences, Northwestern University; Suckjoon Jun, physics, University of California, San Diego -- Principles of Organelle Copy Number Homeostasis
T $220,000
