This grant provides three years of support for two separate programs: (1) to maintain the Sloan Science & Film website, scienceandfilm.org, the most comprehensive site for the Sloan Film Program, and develop related events, outreach, and educational materials and (2) to administer the annual Sloan Grand Jury Prize and Sloan Student Discovery Prize, which celebrate two outstanding feature film screenplays each year that integrate scientific or technological themes or characters.   New initiatives include an annual virtual film summit for all Foundation-supported filmmakers, annual screenings of Sloan student shorts, a catalog of supported films in active development for agents and producers, and a scholarly catalog or teacher’s guide. This grant will also partially fund an exhibition about medical imaging technologies and contemporary art inspired by a Sloan book, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the 20th Century by Bettyann Kevles.    The Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize was created to pick a “best of the best” from winning screenplays at the Foundation’s six year-round film school partners to support its next level of development. In addition to a $20,000 cash prize, the winners receive industry exposure, feedback, and year-round science and film industry mentorship. The Discovery Prize selects screenplays from six new film schools not partnered with Sloan year-round.

This grant is for the research, production, and broadcast of two new documentary shows for the American Experience series: Make Way for the Highway and Feather Wars.   Make Way for the Highway is about the development of the interstate highway system, which revolutionized not only the way Americans drive, but the way they live. And while there were many obvious benefits—greater mobility and faster shipping – there were many neighborhoods that were destroyed in the process, disproportionately impacting poor and minority neighborhoods.  This two-hour documentary will tell the story of the largest construction project in American history and its lasting impact on rural, suburban and urban Americans across racial and socioeconomic lines.   Feather Wars tells the little-known tale of the turn-of-the-century craze for feathers worn in women’s fashion and how the egregious slaughter of birds to feed this frenzy led to backlash and the emergence of the conservation movement. Because the Gilded Age economy created a new class of consumers and the Industrial Revolution allowed for faster and cheaper consumption, the booming demand for feathers in women’s fashion resulted in the wholesale slaughter of birds. This one-hour documentary will trace how Theodore Roosevelt and women activists launched a conservation movement that led to the end of the brutal feather trade and the creation of the Audubon society.

L.A. Theatre Works (LATW), the nation's leading producer of audio theater, will build on its highly successful collaboration with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through the Relativity series. This grant will support the recording, in studio and live in-performance, of three of the best new Foundation-supported plays over the next two years. Leading candidates include Smart, by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, about bringing an Alexa-type AI assistant into your home; Have You Met Jane Goodall and Her Mother? by Michael Walek, about the famed primatologist and her first trip to Africa; and Las Borinqueñas, by Nelson Diaz-Marcano, about the development of the birth control pill as viewed through early clinical trials on women in Puerto Rico.   Each play recording is paired with supplemental material, including interviews with scientists, technologists and other experts.   In addition to these three new plays, LATW will nationally broadcast 12 other science plays from their Relativity series that were previously recorded. LATW will also take the same three plays plus eight additional science plays from the library to be remastered and released as podcasts.   An educational guide with play recordings will be distributed to 3,600 teachers, reaching an estimated 130,000 middle and high school students. There will also be comprehensive marketing and distribution and continued development of the LATW web site and Relativity educational portal.

This grant provides three more years of support for Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST)’s pioneering Sloan science and theater program, which develops, produces, and disseminates plays with scientific characters and themes.With this grant, EST will commission 30-40 new plays over three years, each with a $10,000 stipend. Alongside these commissions, EST will produce three Mainstage Productions, an annual festival with readings and workshops, and provide seed grants to regional theaters to produce Sloan plays.   To date, the EST/Sloan partnership has fostered close to 400 new science plays with 61 currently in development including 28 fully staged productions at EST and over a hundred more EST/Sloan productions nationwide reaching 75 different theaters.

Household surveys are a vital source of information for understanding economic well-being.  But traditional survey methods often fail to capture accurate data on income and government program participation, particularly for low-income and minority groups. This grant supports research by Derek Wu at the University of Virginia to improve the nation’s official income and poverty statistics by linking major household surveys with administrative records. The team will develop new coverage-adjustment methods using federal and state administrative data to fill gaps and correct inaccuracies in survey samples. They will create imputation models to replace misreported survey entries with values derived from administrative records. The project will reconcile inconsistencies between surveys and administrative data to produce more accurate estimates of household income, poverty rates, and other key economic indicators.  The project’s expected output includes revised survey weights, imputed statistical results, and openly shared methods to enhance data accuracy for research on poverty, labor force participation, and social benefit programs.

This grant supports research led by Christopher Snyder of Dartmouth College, in collaboration with Michael Kremer and the University of Chicago’s Market Shaping Accelerator, to explore how microeconomic theory can inform the design of mechanisms for funding innovation. The team will compare “push” strategies, such as research grants, with “pull” strategies, like prizes or Advanced Market Commitments, to identify optimal approaches for driving socially beneficial innovation.  Beyond cataloguing examples that seem to work under certain circumstances, the goal here  is to develop a comprehensive theory for explaining how and when to design better incentives both for the generation and uptake of new ideas.  Outputs will include academic papers and practical frameworks to fund innovation effectively, given real-world constraints faced by funding agencies and philanthropists.

Research led by Jules Polonetsky at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) will study the implications for eldercare of “AgeTech.”   This includes AI-powered monitoring systems, assistive robotics, and other caregiving technologies. The project will document how seniors and caregivers use AgeTech, assess privacy risks and economic barriers, and analyze regulatory approaches in the U.S. and abroad. The research team will catalog existing and emerging AgeTech products and services, conduct surveys and interviews with seniors and caregivers, and examine global policy frameworks to identify best practices. The study will also evaluate how AgeTech adoption is influenced by cost, privacy concerns, and caregiving needs, using systematic reviews and survey-based analysis. Basic findings necessary for understanding the economics of AgeTech will be shared through policy reports, academic publications, and public engagement activities. The project will produce a taxonomy, educational materials for seniors and caregivers, and recommendations for regulators and industry stakeholders.

A multi-institutional team led by Gerald Marschke from the State University of New York at Albany will link Census Bureau data on businesses and workers with the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) data collected by NSF.  The project will produce a new dataset tracking the employment of PhD holders and use it to analyze their impact on regional economies. The research team will integrate 20 years of SED data with longitudinal Census data to document where PhD recipients work, how they contribute to firm growth and innovation, and whether their presence influences wages and economic activity. To estimate causal effects, the study will use event studies and shift-share instrumental variable techniques, leveraging funding shocks to PhD programs as a source of variation. The resulting data will be made available to researchers through the Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) network, and findings will be shared through academic publications and conference presentations.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence are transforming business processes and labor market dynamics.  A large research team coordinated by Christophe Combemale of Carnegie Mellon University will compile new evidence about the impact of AI on the workforce by focusing on four interrelated themes. Adoption: Researchers will analyze how AI adoption alters business processes, job roles, and skill requirements using data on job postings, occupational requirements, and firm-level technology adoption. Transition: Researchers at UCLA will use 20 years of administrative worker and firm-level data from California’s Unemployment Insurance system to study the impact of AI adoption on employment, wages, and policy interventions such as job training and unemployment insurance. Geography: Researchers will develop an “Observatory of US Job Disruption,” a national dataset and online visualization tool providing real-time, county-level unemployment risk data disaggregated by occupation and industry. Talent: By leveraging JEDx, a workforce data platform developed by the Chamber of Commerce Foundation, researchers will evaluate how employer-provided data can improve estimates of AI’s impact on labor markets, identify emerging skill shortages, and enhance workforce development strategies. The project will produce academic papers, policy reports, data tools that include the Observatory of US Job Disruption.  The research is expected to inform workforce training policies and provide empirical evidence to guide AI-related labor policy decisions.