This grant continues support to the Data Science Team of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), which provides data and computational infrastructure and services to the DCO membership. Led by Peter Fox at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Data Science Team provides key services to the DCO. Supported activities include the development and progressive improvement of deepcarbon.net, management of the DCO’s scholar database, and hosting an archive of all DCO plans, policies, publications by member scholars, and scientific data collected or generated by hundreds of individual DCO research projects. In addition, the team is responsible for the DCO’s data science efforts, working with the community to turn DCO data into a searchable corpus that can be agglomerated and analyzed to reveal new geoscientific insights. Finally, the Data Management team is a crucial player in the larger effort to synthesize a series of deep Earth carbon models from knowledge gained from the DCO’s decade of research. Grant funds will provide operational support for these core functions for two years.

This grant funds efforts by Robert Downs of the University of Arizona and Robert Hazen, cofounder of the Deep Carbon Observatory, to undertake a systematic application of evolutionary theories to carbon minerals. Downs and Hazen have argued persuasively that the lens of evolution fruitfully explains key aspects of diversification of mineral species, mineralization rates, and structural complexity through Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. Two-thirds of Earth’s mineral species are biologically mediated, inextricably linking the geosphere and biosphere in co-evolution. Grant funds support two interconnected activities. First, Downs and Hazen will develop and exploit data resources, statistical modeling, and visualization tools to understand quantitatively Earth’s changing carbon mineralogy from crust to mantle. Second, they will expand and explore the Deep-Time Data Infrastructure, which combines mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, and proteomics resources. Planned outputs include an open-access carbon mineral data base with more than 10,000 data sets for carbon-bearing minerals that include age, locality, and depth.

Funds from this grant support MoBE 2017, a two-day Microbiology of the Built Environment Research and Applications Symposium to be held October 11–12, 2017 at the U.S. National Academies in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the symposium is to engage and inform potential funders and community stakeholders by highlighting research findings, identifying intersections with stakeholder missions, and showcasing a National Academies consensus study, Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application, which documents the state of knowledge on the microbiome/built environment interface, identifies knowledge gaps, and sets out a list of prioritized areas for future research. Each day of the symposium will include one keynote speaker and four themed sessions. Topics to be discussed include the nexus of microbial exposure and building design, public health and indoor microbial communities, manipulating microbiome composition through architectural choices and material selection, and potential applications of indoor microbial research. A total of 160 guests are expected, including researchers, journalists, industry representatives, and policymakers from state, federal, and international government bodies. MoBE 2017 promises to be an important capstone event for the Foundation’s MoBE program as we near the end of planned grantmaking in 2017. If successful, it will engage and inform potential funders and community stakeholders from government agencies, philanthropic organizations, and companies, while celebrating the scientific achievements of the program.

There are nearly 600,000 portable classrooms across the country. These “temporary” structures are plagued with problems: poor ventilation, water intrusion, high levels of formaldehyde, and insufficient building maintenance. The problems are particularly worrisome given that recent studies have shown that poor indoor air quality can reduce cognitive performance. This grant funds a team led by Professor Kerry Kinney at the University of Texas, Austin, to construct a case study examining how “hidden spaces” in a temporary-yet-permanent building influence the indoor microbiome. Hidden spaces like ceiling plenums and crawl spaces can be important vectors for the spread of microbes indoors. Dark, moist, and infrequently cleaned, such spaces often contain high levels of contaminants, which may subsequently be spread throughout the building by drafts. Studying actual portable classrooms, Kinney and her team plan to identify where microbes and other contaminants come from and where they go within classroom and hidden spaces, and then determine how positive and negative pressurization from ventilation systems affects the microbiota and other contaminants in various parts of the portable classroom The researchers will share their findings by publishing in building science, life science, and trade journals; in web posts; and by using social media to direct readers to these postings. The team will also make presentations at national and international meetings. Both a graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow will be trained in indoor microbiome and building science studies during the research.

Urban transportation systems have been studied as vectors for the transmission of infectious disease, but their role in moving harmless microbes among hosts is largely unknown. This grant funds a project by Curtis Huttenhower, associate professor of computational biology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate member of the Broad Institute, to determine the metabolic activity of host- and environmentally derived microbes in the public transportation microbiome and reconstruct associated biochemical pathways. Huttenhower’s study will determine the degree to which transit-associated microbial communities are functionally active as well as the basic microbial biochemical processes by which they persist in situ and (re-) transmit to and from human hosts. The team plans to share functional data and metadata through open access repositories. Manuscripts will be made open access whenever possible, and all software will be made freely available open source commensurate with the lab's existing work. The team expects to publish at least two papers and present the work at two conferences.

Administered by the Council for Economic Education (CEE), the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards recognize excellent high school economics teachers from the New York metropolitan area. The candidates are selected annually based on their effectiveness, creativity, and ability to motivate underserved students. Three winning teachers receive a cash award of $5,000, and their schools each receive $2,500 to support economics education. Honorees are recognized at the CEE’s Visionary Awards dinner, which is attended by academic and practicing economists as well as business and civic leaders. Funds from this grant support administration of the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards for two years. Additional funds support a series of activities by CEE aimed at strengthening economic education in the New York metropolitan area, including six professional development workshops for economics teachers, a three-day teacher boot camp, a pilot program to test innovative economics curricula, and outreach efforts to increase participation.

Most of the advances in microbiology over the past 15 years have focused on bacteria and, to a lesser extent, on archaea and viruses. Protists (microbial eukaryotes), on the other hand, are relatively unstudied, in part because their genomes are large, complex, and poorly represented in the reference genome collections. Funds from this grant support work by Professor Jane Carlton, a leading protist metagenomic expert, to conduct a pilot project to discover protists in pets and pests in all five boroughs of New York City. Carlton will team up with researchers at Fordham University, Barnard College, Hunter College, and the Department of Environmental Protection to collect samples from 20 cats, 20 dogs, 20 rats, 20 mice, 20 cockroaches, and 20 pigeons from each of the five boroughs of New York City, for a total of 600 samples. The team will then use wet-lab methods and computational pipelines to characterize protists found in sewage collected from 14 NYC treatment plants, which service the five NYC boroughs. These data will then be used to amplify and characterize the 18S rRNA marker gene from the pet and pest samples to characterize community diversity and look for associations between the protists found in sewage and the pets and pests that harbor them. The overarching goal is to develop and demonstrate the viability of methods to reliably discover protists in host organisms.

As computers and computational analysis becomes an increasingly central part of scientific practice, more and more scientists are becoming better and better at writing and amending software and code. What scientists often don’t know how to do, however, is to transition a piece of software from something built in their own lab to a sustainable open source, community-driven project. Open source software development, however, has proven to be one of the singularly most influential paths to widespread adoption, dissemination, and innovation in software development. In order for open source to be a viable sustainability strategy for some scientific software, there needs to be better support and training for scientists to “do open source.” This grant funds an initiative at the Mozilla Foundation to help train scientists in the launch and management of open source software development projects. Funded activities include the development of an expanded open science curriculum that details best practices for open source software development, project management, community organizing and facilitation, engaging noncoders, and data management. Additional grant funds support a series of workshops, online chats, and conference calls on these and related topics and and a community-based mentorship program.

In 2013, the Foundation partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to launch a five-year, $37.8 million initiative that aspired to advance data-intensive scientific discovery, empowering researchers to be vastly more effective by utilizing new methods, new tools, new partnerships, and new career paths. The initiative led to the funding of three university partnerships, one with New York University, one with the University of California, Berkeley, and one with the University of Washington, to create Data Science Environments (DSEs) that would innovate new models for advancing data science at American universities. The centers would focus on three core goals: crafting meaningful interactions between data scientists and disciplinary scientists, experimenting with long-term, sustainable career paths for data scientists in the university system, and developing new analytical tools and research practices that will empower scholars to work effectively with data. Funds from this grant support a team at Abt Associates to document and evaluate the individual and joint progress of the three Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments. Combining qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis, the Abt team will document DSE goals and activities, provide annual reports to each DSE on its progress, and produce three major reports: a landscape survey of data science efforts in top U.S. research universities broadly (to contextualize the DSE activities); an implementation study of the actual execution of the DSE activities at the three universities; and an impact study that aims to understand the consequences of the unique DSE interventions on individual career paths and research outcomes as well as on institutional structures.

In 2013, the Foundation partnered with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to launch a five-year, $37.8 million initiative that aspired to advance data-intensive scientific discovery, empowering researchers to be vastly more effective by utilizing new methods, new tools, new partnerships, and new career paths. The initiative led to the funding of three university partnerships, one with New York University, one with the University of California, Berkeley, and one with the University of Washington, to create Data Science Environments (DSEs) that would innovate new models for advancing data science at American universities. The centers would focus on three core goals: crafting meaningful interactions between data scientists and disciplinary scientists, experimenting with long-term, sustainable career paths for data scientists in the university system, and developing new analytical tools and research practices that will empower scholars to work effectively with data. Initial funding in 2013 was for three years. This grant provides the anticipated final two years of funding.