‘Nice surprise’ worth $400k for Clemson researcher

Photo by Special to the Independent-Mail

Shelie Miller

CLEMSON UNIVERSITY — A Clemson University researcher has hit it big, and it’s not the lottery.

ShelieMiller, an assistant professor in environmental engineering, was awarded $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to advance her research — and her visibility.

The money is from the NSF’s Career Award, which spotlights junior scientists and helps them advance their work and careers. Landing a Faculty Early Career Development Program award is considered a big honor for up-and-coming researchers. Candidates can apply three times for the award, but Miller won the first time.

“It was definitely a very nice surprise,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to get it the first time out.”

Miller, 30, was one of 453 winners from more than 2,600 proposals made to the National Science Foundation, said Elizabeth VanderPutten, a spokeswoman for the NSF.

“All NSF awards are reviewed for their intellectual merit and broader impacts,” VanderPutten said in an email. “But Career proposals are supposed to have innovative research with a scope consistent with a five-year award and a plan for integrating education and research.

“We expect that awardees will be leaders in both research and in bringing the excitement of research to their classes,” she said.

Miller, who received her doctorate at the University of Illinois at Chicago before coming to Clemson two and a half years ago, said the money goes for graduate student research. It is also for education, materials and equipment such as computers for her work, and in this case, for a documentary this summer to explain bioenergy issues.

Miller’s specialty is life-cycle assessments, in which she analyzes products and processes’ effects on the environment.

In her proposal, “Predictive and Dynamic Lifecycle Assessment,” she wanted to look at forecasting environmental impacts of systems not yet developed.

“I’m looking at bioenergy, specifically switch grass grown in South Carolina and the environmental impacts of growing switch grass to turn into biofuels,” she said.

Switch grass could potentially replace corn or sugar cane as a source for ethanol, although it hasn’t been shown yet to be economically viable, she said.

“What may have better potential from an environmental context is compressed (switchgrass) briquettes and burning it in coal-fired power plants,” Miller said. “You can use up to 20 percent biomass in coal-fired power plants and … it improves air quality coming out … so you have fewer sulfur dioxide emissions and fewer carbon dioxide emissions.”

In addition, there is less energy used in making a switch grass briquette as a biofuel, she said.

Carolina Pacific, a company in North Charleston, already ships forestry waste briquettes to Europe for use in energy plants and has shown interest in the switch grass idea, she said.

“We could just as easily use it in power plants here,” she said.

Miller and about 30 other scientists – many at Clemson – are working on the project. Switch grasses “represents a potential new cash crop” for farmers, she said. If adapted for use as a biofuel, farmers could grow it much more easily than corn or soybeans and because it is a perennial crop, part-time farmers on more marginal land potentially could grow it, she said.

“It’s not as labor intensive as some of the official row crops and so it represents a new opportunity for the Southeast farming community and … it represents potentially an energy source could be created in the South,” she said.

Converting row crop farmland to switch grass improves water quality and adds carbon to the soil, which has a climate change benefit, she said.

Politically, the push now is toward transportation fuel-based products and solutions such as ethanol as a way to reduce dependence on oil and reduce costs, she said.

“That’s one of the big reasons we’re trying to push biomass into ethanol instead of the coal-fired power,” she said. But “I’d like to see it in coal-fired power plants.”

“Ultimately what we’re going to do is compare the environmental impact of coal-fired biomass electricity and ethanol and see which one comes out better environmentally,” Miller said.

Miller said she came to Clemson “because it is a very good school and well renowned.”

“There were definitely opportunities to explore research and sustainability-type issues,” she said.

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