This two-year grant will support an ambitious research agenda spearheaded by Dr. Keith Seifert of the University of Ottowa, and Dr. Robert Samson of the Dutch Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures to use advanced DNA sequencing technology to further advance our understanding of fungi and the role they play in the microbial ecosystems of indoor environments. Supported activities include the analysis of more than 6,000 new fungal cultures to provide detailed DNA sequence and taxonomic information, which Seifert and Samson expect to result in the discovery of 50 to 100 new species of fungi. In addition, Seifert and Samson will conduct further research on identifying regions of fungal DNA that can be appropriately used for species identification, as the current DNA region used for identification is effective in distinguishing only 72% of known fungal species. Funds from this grant will also support the education and training of one graduate student and two postdoctoral fellows.

Different parts of the body have different microbial profiles. The microorganisms that thrive in our underarms are different from those that live on our hands, which are different, in turn, from those that live on our scalp. Funds from this grant support a project by the University of Chicago's Jack Gilbert to investigate how these unique microbial profiles interact with the microbial populations of surfaces in the indoor environment. Gilbert will examine the microbial profiles associated with the dominant hand, the gut, and heel pad from 20 individuals in 10 homes. He will then compare these profiles to those found on door knobs, kitchen surfaces, bedroom and bathroom floors, and light switches following a move into a new home. These profiles will be examined every day for two weeks prior to moving and four weeks after moving to a new home, shedding light on whether the microbes found on people are transferred to the surfaces of their homes and, if so, whether the transferred microbes thrive in the new environments they find themselves in.

The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) acts as the Foundation's agent in administering the Sloan Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. NACME receives applications from eligible students, awards Sloan scholarships, sends checks to students, receives and monitors students' reports on their spending and their academic progress, interacts regularly with the faculty who are key to our programs' success, disburses funds to participating university campuses and departments to help them with recruitment and retention activities, monitors the spending of these funds, maintains the database for these Foundation programs, and performs analysis of these data. This grant to NACME funds the administrative costs associated with these activities for the next three years.

Made in recognition of the International Year of Chemistry, this grant supports a year-long slate of activities planned by the Chemical Heritage Society (CHS) to inspire and educate the public about the critical role of chemistry and chemists in contemporary society and to increase public understanding of the role of women and minority women in chemistry. Activities supported under this grant include the recording, transcription, and editing of ten interviews with women chemists, the production of seven 12-to-15 minute web profiles of women in chemistry to be distributed online through the Chemical Heritage Society's website, and the inclusion of an additional section to the CHS website dedicated to the Women in Chemistry product. Additional funds are provided to allow CHS to develop and implement an outreach strategy to disseminate these new online materials widely through social media.

In a recent study, three out of four workers aged 50 or over, and who have never retired, report that they intend to work during retirement. Given the increasing presence of older workers, employers will be well-served to identify talent management strategies for maximizing the engagement and productivity of these workers. One way to maximize engagement and productivity is through providing employees with more autonomy over when, how, and where they work through the implementation of time and place management policies. This grant to the Boston College Center on Aging and Work supports a three-year research project to analyze the effects of such policies. The Boston College research team will partner with up to six major U.S. employers with labor forces larger than 10,000 employees to study the effects of implementing time and place management policies. The team will study the costs and benefits of such programs both for employers and employees, shedding light on how time and place management policies effect such metrics as worker productivity, absenteeism, turnover, and employee job satisfaction. The research has the potential to have wide-reaching impact as employers search for solutions on how to meet the diverse needs of an aging U.S. workforce.

Funds from this grant will support the development and administration of a fellowship program aimed at encouraging young economists to work on understudied or poorly understood issues at the intersection of aging and work. Over the course of five years, eleven two-year fellowships will be awarded, providing a stipend and tuition support to qualified pre-doctoral students interested in studying the economics of labor market activity by older workers in the U.S. The fellowships will be administered by David Card, a leading labor economist and program director of NBER's Labor Studies Program.

Funded by the National Institute on Aging, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a nationally representative panel study of Americans over the age of 50 and their spouses. Respondents are interviewed every two years. The core survey collects information on income and wealth, employment, pension plans and health insurance, physical health and functioning, cognition, expectations, preferences, demographics, family structure, and some biomarkers. Supplemental surveys of subsets of the respondents cover more extensive biological, cognitive, and genetic measures; consumption, education, and human capital; information technology use; prescription drug use; happiness and well being; and education and human capital expenditures. This grant will fund a project by a team of researchers led by Maggie Levenstein of the Michigan Census Research Data Center to link HRS data to the U.S. Business Register, a list of business establishments in the U.S. compiled and maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau. Successfully linking these two datasets will greatly increase the potential usefulness of the HRS, allowing researchers to measure how various health and wellness markers of older workers vary and correlate with the characteristics of the firms that employ them and opening new research possibilities in economics, psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, and demography. In addition to the work required to link the two datasets, funds will support the creation and dissemination of a publicly-available version of the new, linked dataset (suitably anonymized to protect the privacy of survey respondents), a series of papers conducting preliminary analysis of the data, and a conference to promote the new dataset and its use.

Men and women nearing retirement often experience multiple family obligations-to aging parents, to spouses, to adult children, and to young grandchildren-yet there is little research on how these obligations affect the labor market activities of older Americans. This grant aims to address this gap in our understanding by supporting work by Dr. Suzanne Bianchi of UCLA and Dr. Emily Weimers of the University of Michigan to study how family obligations affect the labor market behavior of older workers. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a nationally representative longitudinal sample of over 18,000 individuals from 5,000 families across the U.S., Bianchi and Weimers will address the following questions: 1. How does the need for or the need for financial support-of parents,spouses, adult children, and grandchildren-affect current labor force behavior (including labor force participation and hours worked) of men and women in late middle ages and early older ages? Is there any variance across cohorts? 2. Do people with considerable demands from family stop working or work less, or do people who have always worked less care more for family members?

A large fraction of American Indian students begin their college careers at one of the thirty-three accredited Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). These institutions, most of which are associated with a particular tribe or set of tribes, are relatively new. Although most still provide only two-year degrees and certificates, others now offer a growing variety of four-year degrees and some offer master's degrees. Because of the important role of the TCUs in the education of Indian students, including those who major in STEM disciplines and go on to graduate work, it is important that these institutions' STEM faculty be capable of excellent teaching and guiding student research. Currently, approximately 28% of the 152 STEM faculty at TCUs have bachelor's degrees, 40% have master's degrees or are Ph.D. candidates, and 22% have doctorate degrees. An ongoing program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides scholarships to TCU faculty who are within one year of finishing their Ph.D. degrees with the understanding that these faculty would remain at their TCU institution for at least two years after earning their degree. Though the Mellon program has been successful in encouraging TCU faculty to finish graduate work (18 of 20 supported students have completed their Ph.D.) the supported faculty have largely come from fields outside science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with only two of the twenty supported fellows coming from STEM fields. Funds from this grant will provide monies to expand and supplement Mellon's successful program, administered by the American Indian College Fund, to more aggressively recruit and support faculty from STEM disciplines.

Funds from this grant provide support for a one-hour documentary, to be produced and broadcast by the influential PBS documentary series Frontline, about the repercussions of Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident caused by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan. Starting with an analysis of what went wrong at Fukushima, the program will track the still-developing story and critically evaluate the implications for U.S. nuclear safety and for the future of nuclear energy in the U.S. Using a mixture of archival footage, location shooting in the U.S., Japan, and China, interviews with scientific and technical experts, politicians, policymakers and citizens, the documentary will seek to present a measured, fair, and factually-based analysis of one of the many major policy choices of our time. To ensure accuracy, the production team will draw on a scientific board of advisors who will provide expert guidance and information.