2011-2012

The Salton Sea was formed in 1905-06 when a project designed to irrigate the Imperial Valley went awry and the Colorado River flowed into the Salton Sink for more than a year. The resultant sea, the largest lake in California, proved to be highly saline from the onset. Over time, it was stocked with a variety of marine organisms including popular game fish. The Salton Sea became an extremely popular fishing, boating, and recreation site by the mid twentieth century. It also became a vital feeding site for millions of birds migrating along the Pacific flyway.

Nationally, the low levels of scientific literacy are reflected in the decreasing number of engineering students and falling test scores among 4th to 8th  grade students (NAEP, 2009; NOS, 2000). Declining coverage of science news combined with weak public trust for science is troubling given that citizens should be more involved with policy decisions such as climate change and sustainability (Clark & Illman, 2001).

The U.S. Department of State recently announced the Global Climate Change and Clean Air Initiative in partnership with Bangladesh, Canada, Mexico, and Sweden, with the UN Environment Program coordinating the coalition. The focus of this initiative is on short-lived climate pollutants, which together account for 2.5 million deaths annually from related health effects and account for more than a third of current global warming impact.

Biological electrochemical reactions are ubiquitous in nature and inspire promising avenues of biogenic energy research, but a poor understanding of the physical charge transport mechanisms limits their efficiency and application. In a fuel cell configuration of a bioelectrochemical system, an electrode-associated microbial community generates power as a result of the metabolic oxidation of organic matter.

The global energy shortage has made it an urgent task to find an effective approach to fuel production. Currently, Fischer Tropsch (FT) synthesis is employed as a large-scale process to produce liquid carbon fuels from carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2) on late transition metal catalysts; however, this process requires the costly syngas (H2), a large physical infrastructure, and high temperature (150-3000C) and pressure (one to several tens of atmospheres).

The seed grant is pursued to initiate a new collaboration between the Guan and Law labs on the development of quantum dots (QDs) superlattices for efficient photovoltaic (PV) devices. QD superlattices are highly promising for PV applications because such systems are predicted to have high efficiency for light harvesting and charge collection. However, it remains a challenge to prepare QD superlattices that have functional PV properties. We propose to design new organic ligands to direct self-assembly of QDs into functional superlattice for PV.