This grant continues a Sloan Foundation partnership with Film Independent (FIND), producer of the Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, to support filmmakers and television writers who explore scientific or technical themes in their work or create films that feature scientists, engineers, technologists, or mathematicians as major characters. The FIND program includes a host of interrelated and mutually supportive activities that promote this goal. FIND selects one producer per year to develop a science-themed script in FIND’s Producing Lab, with a $30,000 producer’s grant and a reception and promotion around this project; award one producer or producing team per year a Sloan Fast Track Fellowship with a $20,000 grant and invitation to the Fast Track film financing market; select one outstanding episodic television writer per year and award him or her with a $10,000 grant to develop a science-themed series in FIND’s new Episodic Lab; and award two distribution grants of $50,000 each to an exceptional science-themed film to incentivize buyers to acquire it for distribution. Grant funds will support these awards and associated administration and outreach costs for the next three years.

The grant provides support for an initiative by the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University, partnering with MIT Press, MIT Media Lab, and Plympton Literary Studio, to create an open-access digital edition of Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein. The digital “Living Frankenstein” edition—titled Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds—will present an innovative reading experience and compelling new digital content to the 21st century reader, including a podcast series, videos, and graphical interactives. It is also constructed on the software platform PubPub, developed by MIT to facilitate large-scale collaborative authorship and peer review, which will allow readers to explore multiple layers of content while annotating, commenting, and curating material that they can share with a wide community. The project tackles the novel’s age-old themes of creation and responsibility—and its contemporary relevance to artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and more—to foster an engaged community of readers and a new interactive reading experience timed to the novel’s 200th anniversary in 2018. The digital edition will offer a unique encounter between a great literary text and contemporary issues of science and technology refracted through an interactive digital medium that seeks to transform the reading experience and advance public understanding and community engagement with science and technology.

Funds from this grant support efforts by PRX Incorporated to develop, distribute, and promote podcasts featuring high-quality scientific content or that explore scientific themes. Over the next two years, PRX plans to produce 10 episodes of the Orbital Path podcast, a new monthly program hosted by astronomer Michelle Thaller which covers astronomy, space science, and cosmology; 12 episodes of The Outside, an outdoor-focused podcast about survival science and the science of adventure; 1 science-themed episode of The Moth podcast 2 science-themed episodes of the 99% Invisible podcast 1 science-themed episode of the Theory of Everything podcast 12 episodes of Go Flight, a podcast developed in partnership with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum 12 episodes of Sidedoor, a new podcast developed with the Smithsonian that tells stories about science, art, history, humanity and their surprising interconnections. In addition, PRX will continue to develop and promote Transistor, a broad science channel that showcases audio pieces from the open-call STEM Story Project and tests new ideas and formats from independent producers. PRX intends to use this platform to develop a new signature podcast and will launch with 18 new episodes.

The grant provides production support to filmmaker Ric Burns for a new documentary about Oliver Sacks, the celebrated neurologist, clinician, and bestselling writer who died in 2015. Upon receiving his fatal diagnosis, Sacks invited Burns to film his final days and this production will draw on some 80 hours of unique footage from the end of Sack’s life, as well as other footage covering the full arc of Sacks’ remarkable career. Foundation funding includes support for the addition of three science advisors to the project, to ensure the accuracy of the film’s portrayal of Sack’s work The finished film will have a theatrical release, a US and international film festival run, and will be broadcast on American Masters on PBS.

The Women in Energy (WIE) program is an initiative developed by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University to provide professional development and networking opportunities to female students interested in a range of energy issues. Launched in 2015 with Sloan Foundation support, the program hosts seminars and networking events, provides mentoring, and gives summer internship stipends for students at universities both in the greater New York City region and, increasingly, the larger northeastern area of the United States. The program also connects current female students with female leaders in the energy sector from government, industry, and nonprofits. This grant provide two years of renewed support for the program.

Funds from this grant support a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research project led by two economists at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) (Beia Spiller and Kristina Mohlin) working in collaboration with power systems engineers at MIT (Karen Tapia-Ahumada and Ashwini Bharatkumar) and regulatory analysts at New York University (Burcin Unel) to understand how alternative electricity rate designs might impact the reliability of electricity distribution grids. Many households face a fixed, per kilowatt hour rate from their utility for their electricity use—whether it is midnight in the winter (when overall demand for electricity is low) or whether it is late afternoon on a hot, sunny summer day (when demand is high). Some utilities, however, are experimenting with a host of demand-varying pricing schemes, so that consumers pay higher per kilowatt hour costs when demand is high. There are many versions of these time varying rate design schemes (real time pricing, time of use pricing, variable and critical peak pricing, etc.). By changing the economic incentives facing consumers, these policies could impact the introduction of various distributed energy resources on the grid. You may, for example, be more inclined to install solar panels on your roof to generate your own power on hot, sunny summer afternoons to avoid paying much higher electricity rates during those times. Spiller, Mohlin, and their team plan to expand existing engineering simulation models and then apply them to real world data supplied through a partnership with ComEd of Illinois. This will allow them to estimate how various dynamic pricing schemes would affect investments in solar panels and other distributed energy resources, and how the subsequent impacts such investments would have on pollution, electricity prices, and total system costs.

This grant funds a collaboration between University of California, Davis energy economists James Bushnell and David Rapson and distribution systems engineer, Duncan Callaway of the University of California at Berkeley. The group plans to study how the rise of distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles impact power quality and distribution system performance in California. Working with utilities (such as Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Company) and state government regulators (including the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Air Resources Board), Bushnell and his colleagues will collect and combine data on solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle registrations and then map them to individual circuits in the California electricity distribution grid. This will allow the team to analyze in fine-grained detail how increases in solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicles are likely to strain elements of the California electricity distribution system. The team will then investigate how the performance of distribution systems maps to various socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of California residents.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) employs a substantial number of postbaccalaureate and postdoctoral scientists and economists. These positions train scholars how to undertake policy-relevant science and economics research in an applied setting, outside the university. This grant provides support to EDF to develop a more formalized training, networking, and mentoring program that will train 25 to 30 early-career researchers in the ancillary skills needed to succeed in applied research environments. Training will cover such topics as communications, proposal writing, program management, and team leadership. EDF will also organize a series of workshops that separately target postbaccalaureates and postdoctoral researchers to reflect the different skill development needs among these two groups and will implement a formal mentoring system that will link their postdoctoral fellows with senior scholars across the institution. Finally, EDF’s in-house social scientists will implement a series of surveys among participants to track the impact of this program over time.

Since 2001, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) has served as the sole administrative manager for the Foundation’s graduate scholarship programs for underrepresented minorities, the Minority Ph.D. program (MPHD) and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP). NACME verifies student eligibility, disburses scholarship funds, and tracks student progress. This grant continues support for these and other activities for another three years. In addition to these activities, over the next three years NACME Vice President Christopher Smith and Program Manager Denise Ellis plan to launch several new initiatives related to Sloan fellowship programs, including community building among campuses participating in the MPHD and SIGP, financial analysis of scholarship funds, and reporting on the academic progress of scholarship recipients. In addition, they will begin to administer surveys to supported students both as they join the program and at graduation.

Led by Peter Henry at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the Ph.D. Excellence Initiative (PHDEI) seeks out promising students of color who recently graduated with a baccalaureate degree in economics and offers them high quality coursework, training, and research experience designed to make them very competitive candidates for admission to top economics graduate programs. Incoming PHDEI students take two courses per semester (tuition is covered by NYU), and receive mentoring and research experience through Henry and participating economics faculty at NYU and other institutions. Grant funds support the administration of the program for four years, along with associated outreach, communications, and evaluation activities. Additional funds support an annual summer conference at which current and former research assistants and PHDEI fellows, joined by supportive faculty mentors, will present their research.