This grant funds a collaboration between Sara Walker, a Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, and Leroy Cronin, the Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, to advance the development of Assembly Theory (AT) by formalizing the mathematical structure of the theory and extending its applicability. Assembly Theory is a framework developed to quantify the complexity of molecules and objects by assessing the minimal number of steps required to assemble them from fundamental building blocks. The theory assigns an assembly index to objects, which serves as a measure of their structural complexity. It is one promising framework for quantifying, understanding, and predicting the emergence and evolution of varied types of complex objects. Walker and Cronin will work towards a general AT framework by determining a suite of mathematical relationships that hold across any assembly space. This will involves applying AT to other substrates, in this case, minerals and genomes / proteomes. The team will develop an assembly theory for minerals and they propose to trace out the evolutionary history of minerals on Earth by combining mineral AT with existing phylogenetic methods that reveal evolutionary connections between objects. The team will also apply AT to large molecules made from nucleic acid building blocks (e.g. DNA / RNA) and from amino acid building blocks (proteins). The plan is to combine AT with phylogenetic techniques to gain insights into the evolutionary history of the modern-day transcription and translation systems used by all known life. Walker and Cronin will also attempt to establish connections between assembly theory and thermodynamics. By developing a bridged framework—Assembly Thermodynamics—they expect to quantify how limits on free energy constrain when a selection phase transition takes place, and to make predictions about such transitions that can be tested in laboratory experiments. If successful, this project will uncover mathematical relationships that apply to all versions of AT (irrespective of the type of object undergoing complexification), allow AT to describe complex minerals and polymers (DNA, RNA, proteins), and make connections between AT and thermodynamics.

The transition from high school to college can be daunting for many students, especially those who come from less-privileged backgrounds. One approach to supporting students through that transition is the introduction of college-level coursework (with credit) while still in high school. The Bard Early Colleges (BEC) are a unique instance of this approach in NYC, going beyond individual college courses to build a network of public high schools in which students complete high school graduation requirements by the end of sophomore year and are considered full-time undergraduate students in their 11th and 12th grades. BEC currently enrolls 1,600 NYC public school students across its four campuses in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Each is a public schools, governed by an agreement between Bard College and the NY Department of Education. Across the larger BEC network, 77% of high schoolers are students of color and 73% are classified by their districts as low-income; 60% are first-generation college students and, by the end of their time at BEC, roughly 80% of students receive a two-year Bard College Associate in Arts degrees, including 60 transferable Bard College credits. While the Queens and Manhattan campuses are well-established, the BEC Bronx and Brooklyn campuses are in a “startup phase,” with plans to enroll a new class of students each year until they reach full capacity by 2028. Before reaching full enrollment, these campuses rely on philanthropic support to build capacity for new initiatives that prepare students for a fulfilling and supportive college experience. Funds from this grant will  support the buildout of a new science laboratory on the Bronx campus, enabling Bard faculty in the sciences (across biology, physics and chemistry) to design and develop new biotechnology-based elective courses utilizing specialized equipment such as PCR machines, gel electrophoresis apparatus, centrifuges, micropipettes, incubators and spectrophotometers. Approximately half of grant funds will go to laboratory equipment procurement, and the other half dedicated to staffing, the design of new curriculum, and paid student research experiences.

What should urban transportation systems be trying to achieve? Most government officials have one goal only, which is to reduce congestion. They rely on engineering models and passenger tallies to estimate the immediate effects of a policy change—without necessarily taking into account all the behavioral adjustments that might eventually occur. And so additional highway lanes quickly fill up again due to “induced demand.” The total number of rides per day may increase, for example, but who rides is hardly ever mentioned. What would a more comprehensive approach look like? Economists often find it useful to imagine an ideal social planner. Specifically, how would such a czar set public transportation prices, offerings, and fleet sizes so that—when everyone from commuters to ride-share companies make their own best decisions—the resulting trips and trip durations maximize society’s total welfare after netting out costs of all kinds including externalities due to environmental damage, etc.? Even if it seems like a tall order, economists who study industrial organization naturally think about transportation in terms of spatial equilibrium models like this. Under the leadership of Milena Almagro, the researchers have been particularly successful so far at compiling and combining remarkable datasets. These include cell phone records from entire metropolitan areas. Besides travel routes and durations, they are also inferring information about travelers’ home and work locations, income, and other demographic details as well as estimates of environmental impacts, equity considerations, and other externalities. Based on such models and datasets, the team will dive into four deep research questions. They aim to characterize: 1) Optimal mixes of transportation modes, pricing strategies, and service levels; 2) Where expanding public transportation makes sense and where it does not; 3) The potential role of public transport that is “on-demand” rather than scheduled; 4) Gains due to transportation policy coordination across geographical jurisdictions. All will require the analysis of counterfactual scenarios, cross-subsidies, and other methodological challenges that this team is ready to overcome.

This grant continues support for an ongoing partnership at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) to commission, develop, and produce science and technology-themed plays. Over the next three years, MTC will commission nine new plays by both rising and established playwrights that explore scientific themes or include scientists, engineers, inventors, or mathematicians as major characters. Commissions are selected in consultation with an independent scientific advisory panel that serves as a year-round resource to help playwrights ensure scientific accuracy. In addition to the commissions, MTC will provide dramaturgical support, including readings and workshops, to both Sloan-commissioned writers and non-commissioned writers working on science-themed scripts, present a Sloan-commissioned work annually to the public as part of its Ted Snowdon Reading Series, and host an annual event that features three 20-minute staged excerpts from three prominent Sloan-commissions, followed by a panel discussion with scientists and playwrights.

Inside Climate News (ICN), the oldest and most dedicated climate newsroom in the country, is requesting three years of funding to support one full-time journalist dedicated to local reporting in New York City focused on climate change and environmental issues. While several news media outlets take a national and global approach to climate coverage, ICN’s goal is to instead show the growing day-to-day impact of climate change on New York City. ICN estimates that the new NYC climate journalist will publish 25-40 stories a year. The beat will include topics such as the city’s natural environment; how the impact of climate change on biodiversity can be mitigated; strategies to adapt to climate impacts such as sea level rise, storm surge and heat; mitigation strategies to reduce New York City’s emissions from transport, buildings and other sectors; environmental injustice and marginalized neighborhoods; clean energy job creation; and holding policymakers and power brokers accountable for environmental impacts.

The information stored in genes plays a huge role in directing the cellular processes underlying life, but stored information alone is inadequate to explain how cells function. Cellular forces and associated motions also play a decisive role in determining whether and when genetic information is expressed because DNA can only be copied when a chromosome is in its decompacted state and because forces and other cellular dynamics drive the transition between compacted and decompacted chromosome states. Forces are also central to the creation and migration of chromosomal density fluctuations, pockets of compaction in a nominally decompacted chromosome region (or of decompaction in a compacted region). These migrating density fluctuations can, in different scenarios, contribute both to biological function and to disfunction. Funds from this grant support Andrew Spakowitz, a Professor of Chemical Engineering and of Materials Science & Engineering at Stanford University, to develop theoretical models that will advance our understanding of how forces/dynamics impact the organization and function of chromosomes in eukaryotic cells. Spakowitz plans to achieve a multi-scale model via a staged progression of model development that describes the coupled chemical/mechanical dynamics starting at the molecular scale, he will then expand to intermediate-scale chromosome dynamics (about a tenth of a chromosome), and end with an exploration of dynamics at the scale of an entire chromosome or group of chromosomes. Forces to be modeled include constraining forces that arise from chemical bond formation between two typically distant segments of a chromosome that happen to come into proximity owing to the wiggling motion of a chromosome in the aqueous environment of a cell and which, in turn, promote chromosome compaction; thermal agitation forces (owing to collisions with water molecules) that drive chromosome decompaction; and the force exerted on DNA (by RNA polymerase) during transcription (reading of genetic information).  if successful, the project will improve our understanding of how coupled mechanical and chemical interactions at the molecular-scale drive the organizational dynamics observed at the much larger length scale of a chromosome or group of chromosomes, thereby providing insight into how forces mediate access to and use of genetically encoded information.