In the 1990s, the Foundation supported a project by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt of the University of Colorado, Boulder and Mark Connolly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to conduct extensive ethnographies of students at seven selective colleges and universities to determine why majors in STEM fields switch majors for other areas. The results of their work, Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, provides one of the most interesting, comprehensive accounts of what factors drive retention and attrition among undergraduates in STEM fields. Fifteen years later, Seymour endeavors to return to this issue, updating the findings original reported in Talking About Leaving and expanding her analysis to include examination of efforts by professors, departments, and school administrators to shrink attrition in STEM fields. Funds from this grant provide partial support to Seymour, her colleague Mark R. Connolly, and their team to conduct a series of new interviews at the same seven institutions sampled in Talking About Leaving and to support their subsequent analysis of the data they collect. Their efforts promise to provide new insights into what has changed and what has stayed the same when it comes to why undergraduates pursue or abandon STEM degrees.

In the 1990s, the Foundation supported a project by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt of the University of Colorado, Boulder and Mark Connolly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to conduct extensive ethnographies of students at seven selective colleges and universities to determine why majors in STEM fields switch majors for other areas. The results of their work, Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, provides one of the most interesting, comprehensive accounts of what factors drive retention and attrition among undergraduates in STEM fields. Fifteen years later, Seymour endeavors to return to this issue, updating the findings original reported in Talking About Leaving and expanding her analysis to include examination of efforts by professors, departments, and school administrators to shrink attrition in STEM fields. Funds from this grant provide partial support to Seymour, her colleague Mark R. Connolly, and their team to conduct a series of new interviews at the same seven institutions sampled in Talking About Leaving and to support their subsequent analysis of the data they collect. Their efforts promise to provide new insights into what has changed and what has stayed the same when it comes to why undergraduates pursue or abandon STEM degrees.

This grant supports a team led Noah Fierer, associate professor at the University of Colorado; Rob Dunn, associate professor at North Carolina State; and Shelly Miller, an environmental engineer and associate professor at the University of Colorado to characterize the diversity of microbial communities in homes throughout the United States. Tapping a network of more than 6,500 volunteers across the U.S., Fierer and his team will collect information on volunteer homes and distribute "home sampling kits" which direct volunteers to collect swabs of the microbial populations living in four locations in the home: the outer door frame above the entrance to the residence, a door frame above an interior door, a kitchen countertop where food is prepared, and a pillowcase on a bed. As a complement to the larger study, the team will conduct a detailed study of the microbial populations in 50 homes in the Boulder, Colorado region, collecting microbial samples on multiple occasions and making a variety of building measurement, including humidity, temperature, and levels of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Taken together, the two studies will permit the construction of what promises to be the most complete picture of how residential microbial communities differ across the United States and will provide a huge dataset that can be used to generate and test hypotheses on what factors drive the compositional diversity of microbial communities in the built environment.

To date over 750,000 homes have been weatherized in the U.S. Department of Energy's Weatherization Assistance program to help homeowners make their homes more energy efficient. Some of the energy efficient upgrades-such as sealing ducts and installing more efficient windows-reduce the levels of ventilation in homes, resulting in changes that could influence the size, composition, location, or diversity of microbial communities inside the home. Funds from this grant support a two-year pilot study by Largus Angenent, associate professor in of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University to investigate and characterize how weatherization changes in indoor airborne microbiota of homes. Angenent will study fifteen homes in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, sampling the air both inside and outside a home immediately before it is weatherized, directly after weatherization is completed, and again six months later. Analysis of the collected samples will provide preliminary data that suggest how weatherization changes microbial communities and, depending on results, could form the basis for further data collection and research by the U.S. Department of Energy or some other federal agency.

This two-year grant supports a project by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to enhance public understanding of the economic issues surrounding the older workforce. NORC will field a high-quality, nationally representative survey of older adults about the strategies they use when claiming Social Security benefits and distribute the results nationwide through a partnership with the Associated Press (AP). Survey reporting will be supplemented with reporting on new economic research about optimal retirement asset draw-down strategies and survey data will be made freely available to researchers in a public-use dataset. Additional funds from this grant will provide one year of salary support to a NORC-AP fellow who will cover the older workforce beat, producing thoughtful, high-quality articles on a variety of issues, including aging and work, retirement, flexible work arrangements for older workers, productivity, and the economic impact of an aging workforce on businesses, pensions, and government programs like Social Security.

Funds from this grant will support an initiative by the New York Academy of Medicine to design and launch an Age-Friendly Workplaces Award aimed at recognizing New York City employers with innovative hiring, employment, and retirement practices that maximize the potential of older workers. Employers from each of the city's five boroughs will be eligible, and winners will be selected by an independent panel of high profile business leaders. Grant funds will support awards for between five and ten New York City businesses from a diverse array of industries and sectors, a dedicated website that will describe the awards and allow businesses to share information about best workplace practices, a series of case studies that highlight specific strategies for tapping the potential of older workers, and a published Guide for Age-Friendly Employers that will summarize current findings on best older worker policies and practices. Additional funds will support a robust outreach and public relations efforts, and a public ceremony honoring the winners. The awards raise the visibility of older workers as active and productive members of the workforce and to engage the business community issues related to the older workforce through identifying best practices and local champions.

Funds from this grant support the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, an annual conference hosted by the Board of Control for Southern Regional Education, a 3.5-day professional development conference aimed at providing training, mentoring, career advice, and networking opportunities to African-American and Hispanic Ph.D. students. Funds will be used to support the organization of the conference for each of the next three years and to defray the costs of attendance by, program directors, faculty, and students involved in the Foundation's Minority Ph.D. program.

Founded 50 years ago, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. Over 700 institutions from all over the world belong to this consortium based at the University of Michigan, and its archives contain over 500,000 data files. This grant funds a project led by economic historian and ICPSR Director George Alter to help set standards and address challenges common to social science researchers who work with "big data." Grant funds will support three workshops that will aim to (1) develop consensus among social science journal editors about how to review, publish, and cite data; (2) develop common standards in a variety of scientific fields about how to archive data files and the "metadata" that describes them; and (3) develop a consensus among scientific grantmaking organizations about what data management standards should be imposed on grantees. Additional monies from this grant support a project to investigate the nondisclosure agreements (NDA) many social scientists sign in order to gain access to proprietary information and to explore the possibility of developing a common non-disclosure agreement on the model of the popular license developed by Creative Commons.

One of the few advantages of our complex tax code is that the information gathered can, in principle, provide researchers with accurate estimates of wages, investments, retirement savings, and many other economic variables. In practice, however, it is very hard for researchers to gain access to that information. Recognizing the demand for such data, the Internal Revenue Service has begun making more of its information available in aggregated tables and in de-identified compilations known as "Public Use Files." This two-year grant funds a project by the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, to help make IRS data more useful to researchers, policymakers, and the public. Over the course of the next two years, researchers at the Tax Policy Center propose to add new information to existing IRS data offerings, including data about age, gender, and how joint earnings are split between couples. They will also develop new methodologies for estimating the characteristics of those who do not file taxes, allowing more robust conclusions to be drawn from IRS data. New data and methodologies will be developed and added in ways that protect taxpayer anonymity and privacy.

Casual discussions of the scientific and technical workforce often rely on a pipeline metaphor. In this picture, there is an ample supply of student interest to begin with, but leakage at critical junctures leaves only a trickle of graduates who actually pursue careers in STEM. The obvious remedy is to plug the leaks. But perhaps the "pipeline" theory is an easy but misleading oversimplification. This grant supports a project by Hal Salzman of Rutgers to investigate how various pathways can lead through the educational system to STEM careers. Using the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, Salzman and his team will analyze the complex ways that course-taking patterns relate to decisions about STEM majors and careers, including how students (a) use college as a period of exploration; (b) may benefit from majoring in STEM without pursuing a traditional STEM career; (c) can major in a non-STEM field but still do lots of science in classes or at work; (d) make choices that are influenced by both supply and demand variables; and (e) can thereby end up in scientific careers by way of nonlinear and nontraditional routes. The resulting picture, complemented by a series of interviews with students and site views to universities, promises to help build a more robust, nuanced of the myriad ways in which students may end up in scientific careers.