A Little Goes a Long Way

Breakthroughs often start from small investments. Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) Pilot Awards were designed to prompt cross-campus research with broad implications for the UC system and communities across the state. With seed funding, researchers test new ideas, build collaborations, and generate early results that position them for larger grants. MRPI Pilot Awardees exemplify how this approach pays off: transforming initial support into research initiatives, new partnerships, and tangible real-world benefits.

To showcase how these investments grow, we are sharing grantee perspectives on how their projects parlayed small investments into big rewards.

Student-Centered Research

Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories

We are particularly proud of how the Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories Research Initiative integrated the next generation of researchers into our work. We taught an undergraduate course, conducted a systemwide graduate student workshop where students from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara, selected after an open call, received feedback about their own scholarship from faculty across four UC campuses, involved graduate students in a public art component which involved a performance with two dance groups and a mini-exhibition, and enabled graduate students to create a policy timeline and sample syllabi. Our special journal issue of Amerasia is publishing academic work authored across the entire range from undergraduate to graduate students, assistant professors to senior scholars. Our research team foregrounded student-focused activity as an important way to involve students of various levels in the research life of the university, as a means of ensuring that students particularly impacted by anti-Asian violence have a venue for creative and intellectual response, and to assist faculty researchers in collectively developing creative responses to a difficult problem. 

“Two Doors,” a performance directed by SanSan Kwan; organized by the Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories Research Initiative. Photographer is Robbie Sweeny. Dancers (L to R): Iu-Hui Chua, Frances Sedayao, Stacey Yuen.

Green Materials Breakthroughs

California Center for Green Buildings Research

Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara
MRPI 2023 Pilot Award

We have formed the California Center for Green Buildings Research among five UC campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara) and made important progress towards tackling the complex challenges of providing more environmentally friendly buildings through an integrated approach of capacity building, identifying urgent and critical questions, modeling and methods development, data collection, and case studies. We developed a comprehensive model for considering transportation emissions in individual building projects to determine their significance in embodied carbon. They account for anywhere from about 2% to over 80% of embodied carbon, depending upon the specific material and manufacturing location. A blanket policy on demanding locally produced materials might actually increase emissions. Our findings also reveal that construction materials—particularly concrete and steel—dominate both global production quantities and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and underscore how informed material selection can contribute to emissions reduction pathways. We estimated how much CO₂ could be stored each year in building materials if conventional options were replaced with carbon-storing alternatives: up to 16.6 ± 2.8 billion tonnes, roughly equivalent to half of global emissions in 2021.

Percentage breakdown of A1-A3 (materials) and A4 (transportation) emissions by building material; from article "Exploring the significance of transportation emissions in upfront embodied carbon in buildings."

AI-Driven Discovery

UC Collaborative for AI-enabled Materials Exploration and Optimization (UC-CAMEO)

Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara
MRPI 2023 Pilot Award

UC-CAMEO brings together experts and students across 4 UC campuses from distinct research areas, including chemistry, materials science, statistics, computer science and engineering, to accelerate materials discovery. The workshop and meetings of UC-CAMEO helped chemists and materials scientists to understand and adopt machine learning predictive models and large language models in their daily research. UC-CAMEO also enabled data scientists to understand the challenges in discovering new chemicals and materials, which inspired the development of new data-driven tools. A recent outlook article from the UC-CAMEO team introduces machine learning tools and case studies for integrating these tools to advance chemical laboratories. Furthermore, UC-CAMEO helped secure new funding from programs such as the NSF Materials Discovery Platforms Program, the NSF Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation Program, and several early-career research awards.

Synergizing chemical and AI communities for advancing laboratories of the future