U.S. Rep. Panetta Announces $3 Million in National Science Foundation Grants for UC Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, CA – U.S. Representative Jimmy Panetta (CA-19) announced $3 million in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for scientific research taking place the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). Projects funded by NSF grants advance the agency's mission to promote the progress of science, national health, prosperity, and welfare, in addition to the national defense.

"Our 19^th Congressional District is home to world-class academic institutions, like the University of California, Santa Cruz, which are on the cutting-edge when it comes to research and scientific discovery," said Rep. Panetta. "This significant federal funding from the National Science Foundation will help further the work of faculty, researchers, and students at UCSC and enhance their prodigious research product. I'm proud to have pushed for this federal funding that will promote and perpetuate all of the work done at UCSC to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge about ourselves, our world, and beyond."

"I am thrilled that the National Science Foundation through its recent grants recognizes the important, innovative research of UC Santa Cruz faculty," said Chancellor Cynthia Larive. "The NSF is a key source of funding for our university and many others. I'm especially excited that three of these four grants are CAREER awards, which are among the most prestigious a junior faculty member can receive."

Projects at UC Santa Cruz receiving NSF grant funding include:

• $810,271 for the project, "Global Exploration of the Conditions of Downward Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flash (TGF) Production." About one out of a thousand lightning flashes produces a powerful burst of high-energy radiation called a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF). This project seeks to answer three questions about TGFs: how they happen, why they only happen rarely, and whether the radiation occasionally poses a significant health risk to passengers and crew when aircraft are struck by lightning or pass very close to it. Researchers will continue to operate sophisticated instruments previously designed by our group in lightning hotspots around the world, but with this award we will also develop a new, compact, inexpensive TGF detector that can be produced in large numbers and used by citizen scientists, airline crew, and others, to better understand when TGFs form and whether they are ever a health concern. Most of the funding from the National Science Foundation will support graduate and undergraduate students as they build skills in software and hardware development, theoretical modeling, and field work while designing, testing, and deploying these instruments.
  
• $770,000 for the project, "Dispelling Chemical Misconceptions to Discover New Pnictogen-Chalcogen Bonding/Reactivity and Enhance Transfer Student Success." This project focuses on the discovery of new types of highly reactive chemical bonds between elements that are readily abundant on Earth. The new bonds can then be used to make molecules that sustainably perform difficult chemical reactions that have previously required rare precious metals. Researchers will also work to better understand the needs of chemistry students that transfer into four-year university programs from the community college system.
  
• $550,000 for the project, "Composable Memory Consistency Models for Heterogeneous Systems." Today's mainstream computing devices, e.g., phones, tablets, and laptops, are comprised of many different processing units that are specialized for different tasks, such as image processing and artificial intelligence. This project will develop a flexible, rigorous, and pragmatic memory sharing framework that will enable these processing units to collaborate more efficiently, and thus, provide higher utilization at lower energy costs. The grant will support a team of students, who will configure the framework so that it can be used to: (1) improve the performance of current devices, and (2) inform the design of future devices, further supporting U.S. leadership in the global technology sector. The grant will also be used to develop new educational material for programming specialized processors, such as those used for artificial intelligence; this material emphasizes equitable accessibility to advanced computer science courses, and thus, embraces the increasing diversity of college and university students.
  
• $550,000 for the project, "Groups Acting on Combinatorial Objects." This NSF CAREER award will support Dr. Kasia Jankiewicz and her team in conducting research in geometry and topology, and more specifically in the area of geometric group theory, which studies the connection between the geometry of an object, and the algebraic and dynamical properties of its symmetries. They will study symmetries of combinatorial objects such as trees, i.e. collections of nodes and edges, each connecting a pair of nodes, which contain no closed loops, or polyhedral complexes, which can be thought of as shapes built out of cubes tetrahedra or other polyhedral blocks. The award will also support the initiative "Women in Groups, Geometry, and Dynamics", within which Dr. Jankiewicz will organize workshops facilitating collaborative learning and research experience for early career women researchers. Finally, the grant will fund an invited speaker series at UC Santa Cruz, which will expose students to various careers of mathematicians in business, industry, and government.
  
• $406,274.00 for the project "Submesoscale Frontal Dynamics and Exchange at an Upwelling Bay." This study will examine physical processes associated with fronts that develop off a coastline point in San Luis Obispo Bay, at the transition of zones exposed to and protected from winds. Information for the study will be derived from measurements of flows, temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen obtained from instruments carried on a ship and fixed to the bottom of the ocean. These data will be supplemented by computer model results at different spatial scales, able to resolve the fronts. Additionally, the processes at fronts will be compared to theoretical considerations. The study will suggest ecological implications of the physical processes that generate and dissipate the fronts. The project will support early-career scientists and will recruit historically underserved students. It will generate graphic art related to the project's findings that will be displayed in an aquarium and used for outreach activities.

Congressman Panetta voted in support of a historic 12 percent increase to funding for NSF for FY 2023 as part of the December omnibus, which funds the program at $9.9 billion this year.

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