Eligibility
This award will provide funding to early or mid-career investigators (Associate+) to spend 6-12 months in the laboratory of a private company, a national laboratory, or an academic laboratory in a different institution, with the goal of establishing robust collaborations across industry-academia or across disciplines and taking advantage of the mentorship of a faculty member distinct from their prior mentors.
There is ample evidence that transformative innovations relevant to sustainability require cross-disciplinary collaboration and training, as well as connections between academia and industry. Yet, once a faculty establishes a research group, it becomes challenging to change course and identify opportunities for the application of one’s research when they require knowledge in tangential or sometimes orthogonal fields, such as chemistry and toxicology, synthetic chemistry and synthetic biology, catalysis, and computational chemistry, to name a few. Furthermore, it also becomes challenging to develop robust collaborations with colleagues in industry that allow a two-way exchange of innovation gaps and innovative research products. Such pivots are challenging for multiple reasons, including the fact that faculty would be required to relocate to another facility to acquire the desired training and establish collaborations. To this end, this grant is intended to stimulate and de-risk bold, cross-disciplinary training and collaborations that result in research that is readily applied to sustainability challenges.
Principal Investigator Development in Sustainability (PISD) Grant Winners (Scroll past the Inaugural ACS Early Career Postdoctoral-Faculty Bridge Grant Winners)