Morela Hernandez, Ph.D. - US grants

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

Our infrastructure influences everyone, and even those who never use it. Buildings and roads are where we spend most of our time and also account for the majority of energy use and associated emissions in the United States and globally. This project pursues transformative infrastructure improvements through a new approach merging engineering and psychology. The new approach promises solutions that do not rely solely on material resources, which often cost less than purely technological responses, and can be more rapidly translated from research to practice. Beyond better infrastructure, this project's merging of engineering and psychology promises societal impacts in three additional ways. First, through engineering workforce development, by not only better preparing engineers for current engineering jobs, but also by extending the types of jobs for which engineering students are prepared. Second, through diversity and culture of inclusion, by broadening the pool of people who see themselves as potential engineers and by appealing to a more diverse group of prospective engineers. And third, by building an innovation ecosystem through the embedded industry partnerships that are central to this project.

This project is to plan for an ERC that envisions services (e.g., shelter, mobility, and water) provided via infrastructure that goes beyond reducing negative environmental impacts to actually creating positive ones. Such restorative infrastructure addresses engineering grand challenges and supports global development goals. Restorative infrastructure is elusive, however, in large part because it requires merged understanding of technological and social systems, and therefore of engineering and psychology. The potential ERC will pursue convergence research between these disciplines, focused on identifying obstacles to and opportunities for creating restorative infrastructure. The project core team brings together engineers and psychologists, academics and practitioners, already working together on convergence research for restorative infrastructure. This planning grant will help the core team mature these unique existing relationships and extend team formation to a larger stakeholder community. The team plans to facilitate engineering workforce development with embedded research residencies in which researchers study fundamental questions in natural contexts with program partners. The core team will identify and fill gaps in disciplinary and practical expertise through in-person planning charrettes held in conjunction with the ideas42 Behavioral Summit (October 2018, New York) and Engineering Sustainability Conference (April 2019, Pittsburgh). Building upon the in-person meetings, virtual bi-weekly meet-ups will include invited presentations followed by structured conversation around ERC pillars. Economics and other fields have advanced their theoretical foundations by rigorously incorporating psychology to account for systematic deviations from "rational" models of consistent, utility-maximizing, thinking and behavior. This ERC seeks analogous advances for engineering, through the social focus on restorative infrastructure. Research will advance understanding of environmental sustainability, infrastructure systems, and engineering design. Pursuing this vision will make much-needed intellectual contributions to both extend the boundaries of engineering as well as bring more applications of psychology into engineering-related research and practice.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.