Instituted two years ago to reward the most promising student screenwriters, the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize is awarded annually to the single best student screenplay from among the Foundation's six film school partners: American Film Institute, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, UCLA, and USC. Winning scripts demonstrate how scientific content can become the basis for an entertaining and marketable film, and previous winners-Robert Cohen's Bystander and Grainger David's Pennystock-have gone on to garner significant media and industry attention. Selected by an independent panel of scientists, actors, and industry insiders, winners of the award receive a $30,000 production grant to help turn the script into a completed film; support from a noted industry mentor to guide the project; a committed science advisor; and marketing (meetings, readings, events), distribution, and networking support to maximize the screenplay's chances of production and distribution. This grant provides continued support for the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize for two years.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the development, launch, and operation of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Scheduled to launch in April 2013, the DPLA aims to create an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that will make the nation's scientific and cultural heritage universally accessible to the public. Funds from this grant support the continued development of the DPLA platform architecture and interface, community-building efforts and technical support to expand and strengthen the growing network of content providers, and administrative funds for the hiring of an executive director and two full time staff members.

Orphan works are those works whose copyright owners are either unknown or un-locatable after a diligent search. They comprise a significant percentage of all copyright works. (For example, about 50 percent of Haathi Trust's 10 million volumes are estimated to be orphan works.) Because libraries and archives are wary of running afoul of copyright restrictions on orphan works, they often avoid digitizing them or making them available online, thus vastly limiting public access to millions of important books and documents. This grant funds a project by American University law professor Peter Jaszi to develop best practice guidelines for the legal digitization and distribution of orphan works. Funds will support an initial paper explaining the legal obstacles to the dissemination of orphan works, 10 focus group sessions to discuss orphan work issues and policies with relevant stakeholders around the country, a paper outlying best practices, and dissemination activities to publicize those practices to libraries, universities, museums, and other stakeholders.

The Forum on Microbial Threats (Forum) was created in 1996 to address emerging, re-emerging, and novel infectious diseases and has become one of the leading places to address issues in microbial ecology and microbiology. The Forum gathers experts, develops agendas, conducts three meetings and two symposia per year, and publishes reports. Funds from this grant provide partial support to the Forum over a three-year period. Among the planned topics for future workshops and symposia is "The Movement of Microorganisms and the Microbial Ecology of the Built Environment", a workshop of interest to the Foundation's Microbiology of the Built Environment Program and one that will help set the stage for future efforts towards a full National Academies' study and report on the microbiology of built environments.

The most popularly used survey of older Americans-the National Institute on Aging's (NIA) Health and Retirement Study (HRS)-has a limited number of questions that address with any specificity the ways that Americans work into their 60s and 70s as they transition from full-time employment to full-time retirement. What is needed is an opportunity to devise and test questions that will better capture the aspirations, expectations, and work patterns of aging Americans so as to improve the measurement and modeling of older Americans' evolving labor market behaviors. This grant to fund the work of New York University economist Andrew Caplin provides such an opportunity. Caplin has formed a partnership with NIA and Vanguard, one of the world's largest investment management companies, to createe a panel of older Americans, entitled, the MINYVan panel. This MINYVan panel will allow Caplin and colleagues to experiment with questions that will better measure labor market preferences and opportunities of an aging population. They will also pose questions concerning expectations of future work and pay and questions concerning hypothetical behavior in various possible future contingencies. For example, they will investigate whether or not an individual who chooses to stop work believes that they would be able to return to work for high pay at some point in the future. By studying panel responses Caplin and colleagues will begin to develop appropriate structural models of labor market behavior and design a complementary survey that will focus on labor market preferences and behaviors. This work will not only yield interesting insights in itself, but will be useful to future discussions about how how labor-market activities questions on the HRS can be made more robust.

This two-year grant funds a project by John Durant and the MIT Museum, leaders in the Science Festival Alliance, to launch 12 new science festival initiatives in communities with "relatively small resource bases," supporting festivals in communities that would otherwise lack the budget or experience to launch their own. The Science Festival Alliance has identified four lead festivals-in Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, and Missouri-to act as models. Harnessing experienced mentors, the Science Festival Alliance will use modest challenge grants and how-to resources to help local science festival efforts get off the ground. Additionally, they will strengthen connections within the science festival community while establishing methods expanding festivals to under-resourced communities. This grant is a promising way to expand the science festival experience to communities across the country and, if successful, would represent a 33 percent increase in the 36 local science festivals that currently exist in America.

ICELA, the International Center for Executive Leadership in Academics at Drexel University, exists to "increase the number and impact of women in academic leadership positions through two innovative programs: Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) and Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering (ELATE)." ELAM, begun in 1995, is a one-year leadership program to expand the national pool of women qualified for positions of leadership in academic medicine, dentistry, and public health. Now with over 700 graduates, the ELAM program has made significant progress, with alumnae serving in leadership positions from department chair to president at over 180 U.S. and Canadian academic health centers. Notably, 9 of the 23 women deans of U.S. medical schools are ELAM alumnae. Using the ELAM model, ICELA began a ELATE in 2012, focusing on leadership development for senior women faculty in engineering, computer science, and related fields. Funds from this grant support a thorough evaluation of the outcomes and impact (both individual and institutional) of the ELATE classes finishing in June 2013, 2014, and 2015. Besides analyzing the data from the pre- and post-program surveys, the deliverables of the new project will include: 1) a system by which the fellows' institutional action projects will be categorized and tracked to determine whether the original aims for impact have been met; 2) a nationwide survey facilitated by the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) of deans and provosts to ascertain views on the skills and practices necessary for effective leadership and mentoring; and 3) surveys of the deans who nominated the fellows to ascertain their views on the progress and outcomes of the program and to engage them about further development of institutional support for women leaders in CS&E.

According to the Computing Research Association, the percentage of women earning degrees in computer science peaked in 1984 at just over 37 percent, and has recently fallen to less than 12 percent. The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU wants to show what can be done about it. Courant has specifically designed a new program for this purpose called the G-STEM (Girl's Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Summer Camp. Targeting high-aptitude girls in New York City area high schools, it features intensive classes, practical internships, one-on-one adult mentoring, positive peer support, and lots of follow-up activities. The goal is to strengthen the perseverance of young women interested in STEM careers as they transition from high school to college. Funds from this grant provide support for the G-STEM program for three years.

Funds from this grant support a project by award-winning producer Michael Schwarz to develop, produce, and air a three-hour PBS special on the intellectual, cultural, and technological history of Silicon Valley from its origins in the 1870s to today. The film will explore how and why Silicon Valley has, decade after decade for nearly 100 years, produced world-changing innovation-not just new products but whole new industries: vacuum tubes, radio, radar, integrated circuits, venture capital, PCs, printers, genetic engineering, software, networking hardware, the internet, social media, cloud computing, mobile. Guided by a distinguished group of scholars, historians of technology, and other experts, the program will examine how the Valley has managed to stay on the cutting edge of technology even as that edge has shifted and pivoted dramatically, and why its success has been so difficult to emulate. By casting a longer and more informed historical lens on Silicon Valley, the proposed show promises to stimulate a deeper understanding of how government, academia, and the private sector can collaborate successfully and also provide new insights on innovation and entrepreneurship, especially as applied to technology. In addition to the three-hour film for broadcast, funds from this grant support a public engagement and educational campaign targeted at middle and high school students, a website, a multiplatform digital media strategy including a social media campaign, short-form videos and interactive maps for web tablets and phones, and a strong publicity and promotion effort that should significantly expand both the audience for the show and discussion of the issues raised.

Shortly after the National Science Foundation began requiring all grant applications include a data management plan, a team based out of the California Digital Library developed and launched an online system to help researchers in the University of California system meet the new requirement. Named the "DMP Tool," the system contains information on funder data management requirements and on the data management resources available at participating universities, enabling researchers to quickly sketch a basic data management plan tailored to their particular proposal and institution. The system was a success. Within its first year, the DMP Tool was used to generate thousands of data management plans and has become an important resource for researchers. Because the DMP Tool was built under significant time constraints, however, the technical architecture that powers it was not developed with an eye towards expansion. As designed, the system is not prepared to accommodate the rapidly expanding number of funding agencies who have data management requirements, the increasing complexity of those requirements, or the quickly changing data management capabilities of member universities. The DMP Tool needs a core code re-write to build in the flexibility needed to meet rising demand. Funds from this grant provide support for a substantial rewriting of the DMP Tool software, with an eye toward flexibility and facilitating the effective use of the DMP Tool at a larger number of research institutions. The resulting website will better structure the metadata about research encoded in data management plans and offer broad analytics about research data management across funders, by capturing data management plans upstream of submission. Suitably rewritten, the DMP Tool has the opportunity to become the standard U.S. facilitator of data management plan creation.