Founded by civic technologist Noel Hidalgo, BetaNYC is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping key New York City constituencies take advantage of already-accessible open civic data. Hidalgo has identified New York’s borough president offices and community boards as particularly promising sites of leverage where better access to civic data could be of direct and immediate value to local governance, and where better technical literacy and capacity could tangibly improve New Yorkers’ experience of government. Among its programs, BetaNYC runs a Community Information Fellowship that places CUNY undergraduates in the Manhattan Borough President’s office, where they identify and work to fill gaps in technical expertise at the community board. This grant would build on that program to pilot a “Civic Innovation Lab” in the Borough President’s office that will build prototype solutions to data problems identified by these fellows. The grant is being made to the Fund for the City of New York, a not-for-profit that provides fiscal sponsorship and administrative support to charitable efforts aimed at benefiting the City and its residents.

The $500,000 grant to MIT will establish the Paul L. Joskow Fellowship Fund (the “Fund”) in honor of Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation from 2008 through 2017. MIT will hold the grant as an endowment, allowing donors and others to add to the Fund at any time through gifts, donations, and distributions from trusts, estates, or other entities. MIT will use Fund income to provide financial support, including fellowship support, to graduate students studying energy economics, environmental economics, and industrial organization, in accordance with MIT graduate student financial assistance policies and procedures. Support may include funds for the acquisition of research data, for travel to professional meetings, and for other research-related outlays by the students. Recipients of fellowship assistance from the Fund shall be known as Paul L. Joskow Fellows. This grant was made on the occasion of Dr. Joskow’s retirement as President of the Sloan Foundation and in tribute to his decade of service to the Foundation and its mission.

This grant continues a Sloan partnership with the Sundance Film Institute for a series of initiatives that promote the development, production, and distribution of science-themed films. Annual initiatives include The Sloan Commissioning Grant, which is awarded to a screenwriter or producer with an early-stage science-themed project to support its development. The award includes a cash grant; a stipend for a science advisor and research; mentorship; and year?round staff support from Sundance. The Sloan Lab Fellowship in the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program, which supports the participation of a filmmaker and his or her science-themed script in the Screenwriters Lab, Screenwriters Intensive, or Creative Producing Summit; Winners participate in the Feature Film Fellows Track at the Sundance Film Festival and are eligible for additional Feature Film Program Labs. The fellowship also includes a grant to support the development of the project, including funds for science research and advice. The Sloan Lab Fellowship in the Sundance Institute Episodic Program, which supports a writer with an early-stage episodic project to support its development for television or online platforms. It includes a cash grant to support the development of the project, a stipend for a science advisor, and mentorship and other support from Sundance staff. The Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which is selected by a jury of film and science professionals. This award and accompanying cash prize is presented at the Sundance Film Festival to the writer and director of an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character. The Science-in-Film Forum at the Sundance Film Festival, which is a moderated panel discussion featuring independent filmmakers and leading scientists and technology experts. Grant funds support these initiatives and additional outreach, publicity, and administrative costs for a period of two years.

Funds from this grant continue a partnership with the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) to promote the development and release of science-themed films and support filmmakers who explore scientific or technological themes in their work. Each year, the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund issues an open call for new and established filmmakers to submit science-themed film treatments, finished screenplays, or works-in-progress. After a rigorous independent review process, 2-6 projects are selected each year for support. Winning projects receive between $10,000 and $75,000 to help usher the project toward completion. In addition, winners receive year-round support from TFI, including mentorship, workshops, readings, inclusion in the annual TFI Network market, and arranged industry meetings. TFI also hosts a highly publicized and well-attended screening and panel discussion of a science-themed film at the Tribeca Film Festival each year along with an associated reception. Lastly TFI is launching a new Alumni Discretionary Fund that will provide microgrants to previously supported projects, providing a critical intervention that helps ensure supported projects are continuing to move toward production and release. This grant provides support for these and related activities for a period of two years.

This grant supports a series of activities by the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) to nurture, develop, and champion films that explore scientific or technological themes and characters. Supported activities include the awarding of two $35,000 fellowships per year to promising screenwriters who are exploring scientific or technological themes in their work. In addition, SFFS will give an annual award, the Sloan Science in Cinema Prize, to the best science-themed feature film submitted to the the San Francisco Film Festival and will promote the winning film at the festival with a ceremony, screening, post-screening panel, and reception. The Festival will also host a yearly Since in Cinema Project Summit, which will bring together scientists and screenwriters to identify and publicize an annual “top ten” list of new scientific stories that would lend themselves to narrative screenplays. Lastly, SFFS will partner with the Blacklist to identify promising science-themed scripts and bring them to the attention of developers, producers, and other film industry executives. Grant funds support these activities and associated operational costs for the next two years.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the Coolidge Corner Theatre Science on Screen series, a grant program that helps independent theaters across the country pair current, classic, cult, and documentary film screenings with thoughtful introductions by notable figures from the fields of science, technology, and medicine. Grant funds will allow Coolidge to make 56 grants to independent theaters over the next two years, bringing to 70 the number of participating cinemas across the country. Each theater in the Science on Screen series receives a grant of between $4,000-$8,500 to facilitate three screenings a year with expert STEM speakers, at least one of which is a film developed or awarded a prize through the Sloan Foundation’s Film program. Additional grant funds support a National Evening of Science on Screen in which all the participating theaters hold coordinated screenings as well as funds for marketing and promotion of the program, website improvement, SEO optimization, and social media outreach.

This grant funds a project by WNET, working with physicist Brian Greene, the World Science Foundation, 59 Productions and CounterPunch Studios, to adapt the live stage piece “Light Falls: Space, Time, and an Obsession of Einstein” for broadcast on public television. The piece, which debuted at Lincoln Center during the 2016 World Science Festival and is narrated by Greene, traces Einstein’s journey to the discovery of the general theory of relativity. The piece walks the audience through the stages in Einstein’s journey—from his boyhood fascination with a compass to his desperate efforts to understand gravity to his fear that mathematician David Hilbert would beat him to the general theory. In addition to providing historical information about Einstein himself, the production will explain, explore, and make compelling key scientific ideas related to the general theory such as Lorentz contraction, time dilation, the equivalence principle, Riemannian geometry, and curved spacetime. The producers, working with the award-winning CounterPunch Studios, will also explore deploying a pioneering holographic rig that can generate a digital, life-like, three-dimensional rendering of Einstein so that Greene can interact and converse with a realistic looking historical figure. The completed production will be broadcast on the one hundredth anniversary of the 1919 solar eclipse measurements that confirmed Einstein’s theory and made him the most famous scientist in the world.

This grant provides two years of support for continued production and broadcast of Open Mind. Hosted by Alexander Heffner and broadcast on 214 PBS stations, Open Mind is a 30-minute, one-on-one interview show that dives deeply into a rich variety of topics pertinent to the public discourse. Grant funds will allow Heffner and the Open Mind team to interview five Foundation-supported science and technology authors per year, allowing them to discuss their books and the ideas behind them in a thoughtful and engaging public forum. An additional 3-5 interviews per year will focus on topics of Sloan Foundation interest such as the Digital Public Library of America, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or the economics of the aging workforce. Additional grant funds support efforts to improve the reach of the program, including expanded outreach on social media and enhanced promotion of the Open Mind podcast.

This grant funds a project led by Assistant Professor Marina Vance of the University of Colorado, Boulder, in collaboration with Associate Professor Delphine Farmer of Colorado State University to initiate the development of a data infrastructure for the field of indoor chemistry through an interdisciplinary collaborative field experiment named “House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry” (HOMEChem). The HOMEChem experiment will take place at a test house at the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2018, where researchers from 9 universities will aim to identify the most important factors controlling chemistry in indoor environments. Teams from each of these nine universities will make a wide range of measurements of the test house, including building and ventilation metrics; environmental parameters; spectral radiance and photolysis rates; aerosol concentrations and size distributions; aerosol composition; and the presence or absence of elemental and oxidized carbon, gas and particle phase organics, nitrogen oxides, ozone, nitrous acid, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. Many of these factors will be the subject of multiple measurements by more than one instrument, allowing comparison of instruments and collection methodologies. In addition, Vance and Farmer will conduct controlled experiments regarding cooking and cleaning, so see how these common household activities affect the chemistry that takes place inside the house. The HOMEChem experiment promises not only to result in new knowledge about indoor chemistry, but to surface important issues regarding shared data and metadata needs among indoor chemists and to build community as the various research teams work together to execute the experiment and interpret their joint findings. Research results will be shared through at least eight publications and twenty presentations at high-profile sessions and plenaries at national and international meetings.

Funds from this grant provide two years of operational and research support to the Deep Life Community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Led by US microbiologist Mitch Sogin and German biogeochemist Kai Hinrichs, the Deep Life Community is a global collaborative network of some 250 researchers working together to enhance our understanding of the nature, distribution, abundance, and limits of the deep biosphere. Funds from this grant will allow the Deep Life Community to conclude its research as the Deep Carbon Observatory approaches its planned conclusion in 2019, as well as begin integrative work to synthesize the community’s findings with the work of the larger DCO community. Grant funds will support the completion of three major sampling studies: one in mainland Oman, one in the Atlantis Massif on the north Atlantic seafloor, and one in the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. Other funded research includes the completion of a “Census of Deep Life” that draws on deep life surveys of more than 90 locations worldwide. In addition, the Deep Life community continue laboratory studies of “extreme biophysics” that probe how biological molecules behave at high temperatures and pressures. Finally, the Deep Life Community will contribute several chapters to the technical volume that will summarize the entire body of DCO work and will contribute to the Deep Earth Carbon modeling initiative that provides integrative frameworks for the many faces of the DCO. The modeling has the exciting, maximal aim to predict the distribution of all deep life on Earth in space and time.