Griffin-Cole fund backs innovative climate and energy research at HMEI

A major gift from alumni Christopher Cole ’81 and Barbara Griffin Cole ’82 GS ’85 named the Griffin-Cole Climate and Energy Grand Challenge Fund within the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), providing new support for faculty research and student involvement in climate and energy work. 

The gift was a part of the Venture Forward campaign, which concluded in June 2025, and the University recently announced the naming of the fund as a result of the gift. The Griffin-Cole fund is one of six HMEI Grand Challenges funds. The HMEI Grand Challenges program is a funding initiative that combines research with a focus on student involvement.

The Coles did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

The current round of Griffin-Cole funding will support five interdisciplinary research teams selected through competitive applications.

Geosciences professor and Director of HMEI Gabriel Vecchi told The Daily Princetonian in an interview that the fund allowed HMEI to solicit ideas from faculty across campus. 

“We were able to make a call for proposals,” Vecchi said, explaining that HMEI searched for projects that would connect research with teaching and mentoring, especially for undergraduate students. “This call for proposals elicited a pretty robust response of great ideas from across campus, different collections of faculty members working and suggesting ideas, and we were able to fund five of these projects over a two-year period.” 

Vecchi described the fund as a way to help faculty pursue novel work that may not yet be ready for large external grants, especially in areas they have not yet explored. 

Bess Ward, professor of geosciences and HMEI, is co-leading one of the first research teams funded through the program with Satish Myneni, professor of geosciences. Their project, “Abiotic Production of Nitrous Oxide in Surface Waters,” examines a possible nonbiological process behind the production of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. 

Researchers for the other projects did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Their projects included research on microclimates, coastal dead zones, and a novel process of converting carbon dioxide into plastic monomers.

“The project has just begun,” Ward said. “The mechanism by which it’s supporting [our] research is by supporting a postdoc in the lab who’s made a really exciting discovery that we’re now able to pursue with this funding.” 

Ward said the project also involves undergraduate interns supported through HMEI internship funds. 

The Griffin-Cole Fund, Ward explained, gives researchers room to test ideas before they are developed enough for larger outside grants. 

“[It] allows some seed money, as you might see it, as initializing some research that’s, I think, in this case, really new and exciting,” Ward said. “So you can do some exploratory work and then develop a more sophisticated proposal for the national [and] international competitions.”

Vecchi said that early-stage support like this is very important for what HMEI looks for in Grand Challenge proposals. 

“It’s not just the next reasonable, incremental step to what they’re doing,” Vecchi said. “It’s enabling them to sort of cut a path to something new.” 

The fund also aims to expand student participation in environmental research. Echoing the University’s statement, Vecchi discussed that faculty receiving Grand Challenges awards are able to integrate concepts derived from their research into new undergraduate courses and host undergraduates as interns on Grand Challenge-funded projects. 

Vecchi said HMEI has more than 100 paid summer research internships each year, with students working with faculty on campus, at other universities, and at research organizations and sites around the world. 

“These are really transformative internships,” Vecchi said. “In my experience, these internships have really changed the career trajectory that students envision for themselves.” 

In the University announcement, Cole said funding research at Princeton allowed him and Griffin Cole to connect their support for higher education with their concern about climate change. Cole said Princeton’s inclusion of undergraduate and graduate students in research and internship experiences was part of what made the gift meaningful. 

The Coles have both been involved in environmental organizations. Christopher Cole serves on the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, while Barbara Cole has served with the Watershed Institute in Pennington, N.J., and Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, a land conservation organization on Martha’s Vineyard. 

The fund’s long-term success will be determined through standard research markers such as publications and patents, Vecchi explained. However, he added that success can also be measured by the collaborations that continue beyond the original funded projects. 

“If we saw in five years that a notable fraction of these people were still working together, that there has been a sticky encouragement of interdisciplinary, meaningful research, that would be a success,” Vecchi said. 

Razvan Verde is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Newport News, Va. and can be reached at razvan.verde[at]princeton.edu. 

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.