UB, partners awarded $1.5 million grant to diversify STEM

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The University at Buffalo and partners have received a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to diversify the nation’s engineering workforce and help minimize the environmental impacts of fossil fuels.

The three-year project, supported by DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, is led by Texas Tech University. Additional universities include Texas A&M University and Howard University.

The project is guided by two objectives.

The first is to equip students from minority-serving institutions – a higher education term to describe universities and colleges that enroll a high percentage of students from underrepresented groups – with skills that can help the nation reduce carbon emissions.

Accordingly, Texas Tech and Texas A&M (Hispanic-serving institutions), along with Howard (a historically Black university), will each send two visiting scholars to each of the other participating universities, including UB, for a month each year over three years.

The second objective is to promote cutting-edge energy technologies that can help reduce carbon emissions.

Specifically, the researchers will focus on tools to extract hydrogen from shale gas reservoirs. Hydrogen has the potential to be a clean and affordable source of energy for vehicles, buildings and other power-hungry sectors of the economy.

Haiqing Lin, PhD, professor and director of graduate studies in chemical and biological engineering, is a co-principal investigator and the project’s lead at UB. He was recently awarded $1.5 million to develop a membrane to separate different elements in the air and support gasification-based hydrogen production.

“This project is a great example of universities with complementary expertise and skillsets working together to help grow and diversify the nation’s engineering workforce and also advance technology that could be critical to reducing carbon emissions,” said Lin.

The project’s principal investigator is Qingwang Yuan, PhD, an assistant professor in the Bob L. Herd Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech. Additional co-principal investigators are Berna Hascakir, PhD, associate professor in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M, and Su Yan, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Howard.