UCLA’s Grand Challenges seeks to move forward, finalize committees

The original version of this article contained information that was unclear and has been changed. See the bottom of the article for more information.

Five faculty working groups will help plan UCLA’s first Grand Challenges project toward achieving a completely sustainable Los Angeles by 2020, vice chancellor for research James Economou announced Tuesday.

In the year since its launch last November, manpower constraints and program restructuring have delayed the progress of the Grand Challenges initiative, though organizers said they are hoping things will begin to move forward with the finalization of the committees.

Under the theme of “Thriving in a Hotter Los Angeles,” the university announced plans to create a model of urban sustainability in the areas of water, energy and biodiversity through campus-wide interdisciplinary research.

Each of the three areas will be led by a separate research committee of five to seven members, and a fourth spatial and integration committee will be in charge of making sure research is integrated and complementary, said Mark Gold, acting director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. The research committees are scheduled to meet monthly and develop three research plans, one in each area, by the end of June 2015, Gold said.

The plans will outline the research that would have to be done in the next five years and beyond, said Michelle Popowitz, executive director of the Grand Challenges initiative.

UCLA’s vice chancellor’s office estimates the initiative will cost up to $150 million, Economou said.

This fall, 55 undergraduate students began a year-long course on research and project management skills under the Grand Challenges Undergraduate Research Scholars Program. Students attend a weekly class and work in research projects under faculty involved in the Grand Challenge.

Thus far, planning funds for the project have come from the UCLA Dream Fund, which channels private donations toward research and academics. The project also received money from an anonymous individual donor and a $100,000 grant in September from the Goldhirsh Foundation.

The funds, the bulk of which have yet to be tapped, will be used to start research under the program and recruit graduate fellows to support the research, Gold said.

As research begins, more funds will be obtained through traditional research funding avenues such as the National Science Foundation. To support the process, the program plans to hire a proposal development professional who will assist faculty in writing research grant proposals, Gold said.

“We, in our ivory tower here in academia, really need to understand what the situation in L.A. is on the ground, and we can’t do that without working with people in policy and law and the social sciences,” said mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Richard Wirz, a member of the project’s energy and steering committees.

The three plans will be consolidated by 2020 into a final practical implementation plan based on faculty research from 2015 to 2020. The plan will list concrete steps that groups in society have to take to achieve sustainability, said Popowitz.

Originally scheduled for 2019, the deadline was pushed back because of the challenges Popowitz and her co-founder of the program, Jill Sweitzer, faced after overwhelming positive response from professors who want to get involved since the program’s launch.

Popowitz said she and Sweitzer had been unprepared to handle the size of the project, prompting them to reorganize the program and expand the support team.

“When we first started, we were expecting something with about 10 to 15 faculty, rather than the 150 we now have,” said Sweitzer, who is currently co-director of the Grand Challenges initiative.

At the moment, the second project is already under development though no estimated launch date is available, Popowitz said.

Officials had planned to have six projects under the program, with a new launch each year, but the number is now down to three or four projects, with the first two in progress as pilots, Popowitz said.

“We wanted to do something really big and all-encompassing, but now I see that with our manpower and time, we would not be able to support a third project for now,” said Popowitz.

The projects, each with a different theme, are independent, with different faculty participants, organizational structure and funding support, Popowitz said.

Wirz, who had been part of the team that conceptualized the first project, said they decided to go all the way for complete sustainability to emphasize the urgency and magnitude of the problem.

Wirz said he thinks that although the project’s goals are hard to achieve, they are not impossible.

“I’m skeptical too about whether we can do it in time, but we have to be skeptical,” he said. “If we thought it was easy, then we probably wouldn’t have done anything.”

Correction: The five faculty working groups will outline the research plan. The vice chancellor’s office is not fully funding the initiative. Planning funds come from the UCLA Dream Fund. Officials had planned to have six projects, but did not have those six projects planned.