2026 NSF ERC EARTH Seed Funding Program Awardees

The leadership team at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub (EARTH) has announced this year’s awardees of the NSF ERC EARTH Seed Funding Program, a core component of its innovation ecosystem, linking early-stage ideas to large-scale impact.

This year, six proposals have been chosen for funding. The total amount awarded this year is more than $275,000, which is funded by industry membership dues. The number of proposals and the total amount awarded both increased this year.

The six projects selected for seed funding in 2026 include:

• “Accelerating Desiccant Wheel Development through Transport-Resolved Channel Testing.” Principal Investigator (PI): Bryan Paulsen (Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Notre Dame); Co-PIs: Christopher (Chris) Depcik (Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Kansas), Nosang Myung (Keating Crawford Endowed Professor, University of Notre Dame), and William (Bill) Phillip (Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Notre Dame)
• “Creation of a Circularity Testbed Module with Parallel High-Pressure Reactors.” PI: David Vicic (Howard S. Bunn Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Lehigh University)
• “Developing Advanced Adsorbent Materials for Data Center Cooling Applications.” PI: Zhenqiang (Rick) Wang (Professor of Chemistry, University of South Dakota); Co-PI: William (Bill) Phillip (Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Notre Dame)
• “Flow Boiling Testbed-on-a-Chip for Characterization of Data Center Refrigerants.” PI: Lingnan Lin (Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland)
• “Polarizable Molecular Simulation for Prediction of Next-Generation Refrigerant Mixture Interfaces.” PI: Yiling Nan (Assistant Professor, Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Kansas)
• “Universal-Coverage U.S. Municipal Regulatory Database for the A2L Refrigerant Transition.” PI: Todd Watkins (Arthur F. Searing Professor of Economics, Lehigh University)

Since its inception in 2025, the NSF ERC EARTH Seed Proposal Program has supported new and innovative research ideas. The program has enabled cross-institutional collaboration, supported exploratory and high-risk research directions, and provided investigators with opportunities to pursue high-risk, high-reward ideas that may not yet be competitive for external funding. 

Mark Shiflett, Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Kansas and Director of the NSF ERC EARTH Engineering Research Center, said, “We congratulate these researchers on their initiatives and look forward to the significant outcomes of their proposed research.”

To learn more about NSF EARTH, please visit https://erc-earth.ku.edu

Please direct queries regarding this study to Mark B. Shiflett, mark.b.shiflett@ku.edu.

EARTH Engineering Research Center

The Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub (EARTH) is an NSF- and corporate-funded Engineering Research Center (ERC). EARTH is dedicated to revolutionizing how refrigerants are formulated, manufactured, applied, monitored, and recycled to dramatically reduce the environmental footprint of the global cooling sector. Led by the University of Kansas, this consortium of partner research universities includes the University of Notre Dame, University of Maryland, Lehigh University, University of South Dakota, and the University of Hawaiʻi.