This grant supports a project by Harvard University’s Department of Economics, in partnership with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and economists in other Harvard schools (e.g., the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health), to support 24 “student-years-worth” of post-baccalaureate training in mathematics and economics for very promising underrepresented minority (URM) students. Resources available to students through the program will include a paid research assistant position with a participating Harvard faculty member, up to four courses per year of undergraduate or graduate coursework, access to one of the math boot camps taken by entering graduate students in Harvard’s economics Ph.D. program, support for GRE preparation, travel funds to attend conferences; and peer and faculty mentoring. The project aims to increase the number of Ph.D. graduates in economics and related fields by 8 to 10 percent, and to serve as a model for other universities and institutions interested in increasing the representation of minorities within economics or other scientific fields.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the administration of the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards, an annual awards program run by the Council for Economic Education that recognizes outstanding financial and economics education by secondary school teachers in the New York City metropolitan area. Winners are selected by an independent committee based on a number of diverse factors, including their effectiveness, creativity, and success in motivating underserved students. Winners receive a $5,000 cash prize, $2,500 to be used to augment economic education programs at their respective schools, and are honored at a high-profile event in New York City.

This grant supports a research project by economists Jay Battacharya (Stanford Medical School), Jon Levin (Stanford), Liran Einav (Stanford), and Amy Finkelstein (MIT) to use newly available datasets to compare the cost and performance of Medicare and Medicare Advantage to private insurance plans that cover similarly situated consumers. The team will examine a broad range of questions relevant to health care policy by comparing data on public insurance plan performance provided by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services with newly available data on private plan performance compiled by the Health Care Cost Institute. Issues to be examined include the differences in health care costs, services, and prices in public and private plans; what features of public or private plan structure account for these differences; and whether private insurance plans can or do deliver comparable outcomes to Medicare at lower costs.

Any given research protocol entails a trade-off between privacy and accuracy. At one extreme, locking up data so no one can use it gives privacy but no accuracy or utility. At the other, fully open data provides plenty of accuracy and utility, but no privacy. In between are other protocols—like ones using fully homomorphic encryption, multiparty secure computation, or differential privacy—that provide differing combinations of accuracy and privacy. Together, one can imagine all these protocols forming a production possibility set. This grant supports a project by Cornell economist John Abowd to characterize the “efficient frontier” of such protocols. These are ones with the property that no other conceivable protocol could deliver more accuracy without sacrificing some privacy, or more privacy without sacrificing some accuracy. After assembling a library of such protocols, Abowd and his team will explore and measure public attitudes among these protocols and the tradeoffs, helping us understand public preferences toward the tradeoffs between accuracy and privacy.

The grant funds a collaboration between PBS's American Masters series and Reframed Pictures, a new production company founded by actress Susan Sarandon, to produce a 90-minute documentary about Hedy Lamarr. The show, with Richard Rhodes as the primary technology advisor and Rhodes's Sloan-supported book Hedy's Folly as the primary text, will focus on Lamarr's pioneering invention of frequency hopping—the basis for cell phones, GPS, and Wi-Fi technology—as well as Lamarr's colorful life and her renown as a glamorous Hollywood actress whose fame and beauty obscured her landmark contributions as an inventor.

Funds from this grant support the production of four science- and technology-themed documentaries to be broadcast by The American Experience, the longest running and most successful history series on television. Supported episodes include Nikola Tesla, a two-hour special about the visionary inventor of the alternating current electric supply system and radio control technology who forecast the Internet, solar power, and military drones. The documentary will draw on the recently published Sloan-supported biography by Bernard Carlson, which contains original research about Tesla's technological training and a wealth of detail about his endless inventions, both successes and failures; The Race Underground about the great engineering challenge to build the first subway and transform urban transit told via the competition between brothers Henry and William Whitney, one in New York and one in Boston; and The Aeronauts, a fascinating little-known tale of the Air Force researchers and test pilots who paved the way for the U.S. space program by testing the limits of the human body in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The topic of the fourth show is yet to be determined. Additional grant funds will support marketing, advertising, and promotion of the episodes, both on air and online; an active social media campaign; and targeted outreach to communities and organizations with a specific interest in these subjects.

This grant continues support for the development of Dat, a software platform for the versioning and management of tabular datasets. Inspired by Git, the popular system for version control among distributed software developers, Dat supports the tracking of dataset versions not just at the file level, but at the individual cell level, cataloging cell-by-cell changes to the data. A 2014 grant from the Sloan Foundation has enabled lead developer Max Ogden to move the system from a sketch to a substantial prototype, to ensure that the platform was developed with scientific data in mind, and to launch pilot applications in the sciences using genomic and astronomical data. Funds from this grant will allow Ogden, partnering with Waldo Jaquith of the U.S. Open Data Institute, to move from the current working prototype to a full version 1.0 release. Additional funds support outreach and partnership-building with labs and academic research institutions.

This grant supports the continued development of the Jupyter Notebook, an open source platform for interactive computing that aims to bring the traditional research notebook into the digital age, enabling researchers to capture, log, and version their work from data collection through stages of cleaning, linking, and preparation all the way to analysis and publication. Grant funds will allow the project, led by physicists-turned-data-scientists Fernando Perez and Brian Granger, to hire a project manager and user interface designer, enhance coordination with the growing community of Juypter volunteer developers, and add new features to the platform, including simultaneous multi-user editing, interactive computing capabilities, and better integration with scholarly publishing systems.

Funds from this grant will help Greg Caporaso develop an interactive educational text, An Introduction to Applied Bioinformatics (IAB), that will introduce readers to the core concepts and algorithms of bioinformatics. Focusing on applications to real-world problems, the project will produce a set of interactive notebooks that will allow students to learn about the complex computational methods used in modern bioinformatics in an engaging, hands-on fashion using live code that can be altered, tweaked, executed, and adapted to their own research or data. The project represents an innovative experiment in how advances in information technology are opening new frontiers for high-quality education on computational methods.

Recent advances in instrumentation have transformed our ability to study chemical reactions and analyze the composition of chemicals in the air. These advances provide an excellent opportunity to expand our understanding of the chemistry of indoor environments. This grant funds a preliminary study by Barbara J. Turpin, a professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, of the impact of moisture on indoor chemistry. Turpin and her team plan to take samples from the air of 10 to 20 occupied homes, treat the samples with indoor oxidants (reactants) such as OH or NO3 radicals, and then monitor the reaction products using a variety of techniques. The study builds on Turpin’s prior work demonstrating that aqueous organic chemistry alters the composition and effects of air pollution outdoors. Turpin expects to produce at least two peer-reviewed articles based on the study, and she and her team will present their findings at national and international meetings. In addition, Turpin will prepare a short report that outlines important research questions and obstacles to be overcome for indoor air chemistry.