This grant provides ongoing support to the Sloan Film Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), which will develop science screenplays and produce short science or technology-themed films and games over the next three years. Grant funds will allow NYU to maintain three screenplay awards, one production award, and one gaming award each year, while providing every project with a science advisor. To increase the number of high-quality screenplay submissions during this grant cycle, NYU will select five writing finalists to receive $1,000 in the fall and will provide each finalist with support to refine their submissions from screenwriting faculty and science mentors. 

The rapid development of large electricity load sources, like data centers and industrial facilities, is increasing demand for electricity across the United States. Few entities in the energy system experience this pressure as acutely as rural electric cooperatives (co-ops), which tend to have less dense service territories with fewer ratepayers than larger investor-owned utilities or municipal utilities. However, there has been little research to date on how electricity demand growth might impact rural co-op operations.Led by scholars at North Carolina State University and the University of Minnesota, in partnership with the Smart Electric Power Alliance, this project explores the challenges and opportunities for rural co-ops as they respond to rapid electricity demand growth. First, the researchers will investigate how demand growth patterns have varied across co-op service territories over the past few decades. Second, the team will analyze the different strategies that rural co-ops have adopted in response to increased electricity demand, holding focus groups with staff from three generation and transmission co-ops to better understand how they prioritize their electricity growth management strategies. Lastly, they will examine three case studies in more detail to uncover how institutional and governance structures impact rural co-op decision-making and adoption of electricity growth management strategies. The team will produce academic scholarship along with materials designed at informing stakeholder practices and decision-making.

There have been numerous attempts in recent years to spur domestic clean energy manufacturing at both the federal and state level, including the tax incentives, place-based investments, economy-wide tariffs, and other forms of fiscal and policy interventions. A number of states have also provided targeted tax incentives and investment funds to advance clean energy manufacturing. However, researchers and policymakers still need a comprehensive analytic framework to examine how these energy policy interventions, aimed at different scales and industrial sectors, affect clean energy manufacturing dynamics.This grant will support an interdisciplinary research team with scholars from Baruch College, University of California, San Diego, Indiana University, Stony Brook University, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies to create an integrated dataset that combines information on industry investments in clean energy, state-level energy and economic development data, and trade-related information. The team will also undertake two case studies, focused on domestic solar and battery manufacturing across a broad geographic range, to understand the granular dynamics between federal, state, and local investments in clean energy manufacturing and related supply chains. Lastly, the team aims to upgrade the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) to improve how clean energy trade-related factors are represented in the model, allowing researchers to study how different policy interventions might shape future clean energy manufacturing dynamics. A workshop with key stakeholders will ensure that practitioner perspectives are integrated throughout the study.

In early 2025, the Foundation partnered with UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to support 29 Metascience & AI fellowships for postdoctoral researchers interested in understanding the implications of AI for the science and research ecosystem. As part of the fellowship, the Foundation agreed to host a summer institute to facilitate knowledge sharing, relationship building, and skill development among fellowship recipients.This grant will support that Metascience & AI summer institute, stewarded by John Basl and Katie Creel at Northeastern University. It will also support a partially overlapping nine-week program during summer 2026 in AI and Date Ethics (AIDE). Both programs will be co-located with a mentoring workshop for early-career Computer Science faculty in Trustworthy AI research organized by the Computing Research Association and Microsoft Research. Grant funds will support travel, lodging, and meals for both Metascience & AI and AIDE participants, summer stipends for AIDE fellows, and staff and speaker compensation.  

Funds from this grant support a project by Michael Murrell and Enrique De La Cruz, Professors of Biomedical Engineering & Physics, and Biophysics & Biochemistry respectively at Yale, to explore the role that thermodynamics plays in driving cell division. Murrell and De La Cruz hypothesize that the behavior of a cell’s actomyosin cytoskeleton, a ring-shaped network of filaments, motor proteins and connectors that contract to pinch a cell in two, is shaped by thermodynamic principles, and that contraction of the network can be explained by reference to the fact that contracting and dividing would move the skeletal network into a more energetically favorable state. Murrell and De La Cruz will leverage a ‘reconstituted’ actomyosin cytoskeletal network comprised of purified and synthesized cell components which will allow them to study the system’s properties and behaviors outside the complicating environment of a cell. The team will develop new measurement techniques to measure and quantify key thermodynamic parameters of this system: how much entropy is produced, the energy input to the system, the energy output as mechanical work, and the energy lost as heat and validate these measurements to ensure they yield consistent findings (i.e. no missing energy). The team will then apply these techniques to various configurations of the system, measuring how efficiency varies with system structure, composition, and dynamics. They will then insert the artificial network into a cell-sized lipid membranes to measure how these thermodynamic properties vary during the various stages of an actual process of membrane division. This will allow them to test whether ring formation and contraction in a cell-like geometry is energetically favorable compared to a non-contracting steady state.  The proposed experiments will quantify the thermodynamics of the actomyosin cytoskeletal system at the heart of cell division, and in doing so make an important contribution to an emerging body of knowledge about cellular thermodynamics.