Discovery Grants support fundamental research in sustainability

The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has awarded more than $1.8 million in funding through its Discovery Grants program to 16 research teams. Launched in 2023, the program is intended to support foundational research critical to understanding Earth and planetary processes, life on our planet, energy and infrastructure, and societies. 

“Discovery Grants are meant to support cutting-edge, knowledge-driven fundamental research. These are the sort of spark-of-inspiration, high-risk, high-reward ideas that the school deems essential to drive to deeper understanding of important outstanding questions related to Earth, climate, and society,” said Scott Fendorf, senior associate dean for integrative initiatives. “We place a high priority on novel and unexplored areas of research and creative approaches to exploring a given research question. These 16 projects deliver on that promise.”

Successful proof-of-concept work on these emergent ideas will help school faculty, students, and postdocs then secure funding from outside Stanford, particularly from federal agencies, which rarely support such nascent ideas. 

“As the name implies, Discovery Grants support the earliest-stage research and are designed to expand knowledge and our understanding of the world around us. This type of fundamental discovery is the driving force of our research enterprise and also opens doors to new approaches to the biggest challenges of sustainability,” said Arun Majumdar, dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “We congratulate all those who earned Discovery Grants in this round of funding. We wish them the very best in helping to illuminate such fundamental processes.”

Below, a few examples of the inaugural awardees:

An animal-attached multispectral sonar system to quantify the size, abundance, and distribution of zooplankton – Earth’s most important organisms for global carbon and nutrient cycling

Jeremy Goldbogen, Associate Professor of Oceans and, by courtesy, of Biology

An important aspect of the ocean that drives the distribution of life and global biogeochemical processes is that the average density of nutrients and resources is low. Marine organisms cannot survive on the food available at average densities, yet the oceans are teeming with life. This paradox can be resolved by understanding the heterogeneity of plankton distribution, or patchiness. Ship-based sonar systems have failed to measure plankton patchiness at the most important scales. Therefore, we will develop a miniaturized whale-mounted echosounder to measure plankton dynamics at foraging hotspots.

Deep learning ice dynamics

Ching-Yao Lai, Assistant Professor of Geophysics

Predicting sea levels for the next century remains a major challenge for climate scientists and policy makers. However, the fundamental flow law of glacial ice has never been validated at the ice-shelf scale. Here, we will take advantage of recent advances in physics-informed deep learning to learn the fundamental constitutive ice flow law from observational data. In physics-informed deep learning a neural network is trained based not only on empirical ice-sheet data but also on the governing physical principles (e.g., conservation of mass and momentum). This approach provides an opportunity to reveal unknown physical laws and build better climate predictions. 

Developing a bacterial key to unlock the functional diversity of fungal symbioses

Kabir Peay, the Victoria and Roger Sant Director of the Earth Systems Program, Associate Professor of Biology and of Earth System Science, and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Fungi form a cooperative partnership, known as mycorrhizal symbiosis, with the roots of most plants on Earth. Single trees can associate with hundreds of fungal species, and these partnerships change over time and space to meet environmental challenges. Our capacity to understand and harness this diversity is limited, however, by the simple fact that we cannot easily grow most mycorrhizal fungi. Our project tests the new hypothesis that a missing partner – symbiotic bacteria we isolated from mycorrhizal roots – can overcome the culture barrier, improving our understanding of fungal biodiversity, and opening new avenues to meet conservation and restoration goals.

Identification and characterization of novel bacterial cholesterol-interacting proteins

Paula Welander, Associate Professor of Earth System Science and, by courtesy, of Biology and of Earth and Planetary Sciences

This proposal will explore a new area in sterol lipid biology that focuses on characterizing all the cholesterol-binding proteins – the cholesterol interactome – in bacteria using proteomic approaches. Cholesterol is a ubiquitous and essential component of eukaryotic life with important roles in intra- and intercellular signaling, stress tolerance, maintaining cell membrane integrity, and human disease. However, the physiological significance of sterol lipids like cholesterol in bacterial cells is much less understood. This work has the potential to provide insight into novel bacterial protein-cholesterol interactions that can reveal new fundamental biochemical, regulatory, or transport mechanisms. 

View the full list: 2023 Stanford Doerr Discovery Grant recipients