This grant will fund the efforts by Noah Fierer, a young researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to examine the diversity and structure of microbial communities in kitchens. Fierer-in collaboration with his colleague Rob Knight-plans to collect samples from twelve residential kitchens to determine the geographical distribution of microbial communities and to track the movements of the communities across kitchen surfaces. He plans to collect samples from a number of kitchen surfaces before and after meal preparation and collect samples from a variety of foods that were used to prepare the meal. DNA will be isolated from the samples and then amplified, sequenced, and analyzed using bio-informatic tools.

This grant to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) will fund new scholarship obligations in the Foundation's Minority Ph.D. program (MPHD) and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) that are expected to be incurred between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012. NACME, the Foundation's longtime agent in administering these programs, receives and processes scholarship applications, selects students for scholarships, administers the awards, and supports recruitment efforts by faculty at participating colleges and universities. Funds from this grant will support 93 scholarships for minority students entering the Minority Ph.D. program in AY 2011-12 and 26 scholarships for students entering the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership in AY 2011-12.

Each year since 2009, visitors to the World Science Festival's Street Fair in New York City have experienced the Math Midway, a large and crowded carnival filled with mathematical toys and activities such as square-wheeled bicycles you can ride on a cycloidal track and plastic polyhedral solids that reveal surprising cross sections when you shine laser light through them. The Math Midway is one of many successful components unique to the World Science Festival, which the Sloan Foundation helped launch though its program on the Public Understanding of Science and Technology. Most science festivals struggle to present any kind of compelling mathematical content at all. The creators of Math Midway would now like to share what they have built, as well as what they have learned, with science festival planners and participants throughout the country. Funds from this grant will support efforts by Museum of Mathematics founder Glen Whitney to develop up to 20 portable versions of the Math Midway exhibitions that can travel to science and mathematics festivals across the country. The Science Festival Alliance, a Sloan Foundation grantee, has already arranged for these exhibits to be displayed and tested by organizations operating under its umbrella, including science festivals in San Diego, Philadelphia, Harlem, Cambridge, and the Bay Area. The project will also train local mathematicians to staff these exhibitions. Independent evaluation of the construction, deployment, and reception of the first six such kits is also part of the project plan under this grant, and will help clarify what works and what next steps might make sense going forward to enhance public engagement with mathematics.

Much of the empirical research on aging and work actually focuses on aging and "end of work"-retirement. Significantly less research has been conducted on how the non-financial, as well as financial, conditions of work affect the decision to stay in the labor force beyond conventional retirement. To address this, Michican State University professor Peter Berg and his colleagues Chris Ruhm and Mary Hamman intend to assess how the "employment environment," defined to include characteristics of the job, employer, and the industry, facilitates or impedes individuals' abilities to work past conventional retirement age. To conduct their analysis, Berg and his team will rely on a uniquely rich German dataset, which includes detailed questions regarding the employment environment and contains extensive data on such relevant factors as staffing patterns, scheduling, hours of work, modifications to jobs demands, financial information, and turnover. Funds from this grant will support this research. The results of this study will likely shed light on the kinds of variables that could in the future be included in U.S. survey instruments, such as the Health and Retirement Study and could be important in identifying what U.S. employers might consider doing in order to keep employees working past age 65.

The viability of the current Social Security system and its need for reform has been a topic of recent public and political concern. What has not been getting comparable public or political attention, however, is the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, which provides benefits to American workers who suffer from disabilities. SSDI's eligibility rules act as a major disincentive for continued employment for those applying for its benefits, since they provide income support and Medicare coverage to individuals with work-limiting disabilities only if they do not engage in substantial gainful employment. Yet despite this disincentive, some disabled workers continue working in some capacity. Funds from this grant will support research by the RAND Corporation to advance our understanding of how employer practices affect workers' continued employment after the onset of a work-limiting disability. Questions to be addressed by this research include: 1. How does workplace accommodation (with regard to how, when, and where work is done) affect the duration of continuing employment by an older worker following onset of disability? 2. How does health insurance coverage (availability, continuity, and source) and pension coverage (type and eligibility ages) affect the duration of continuing employment by an older worker following onset of disability? This project will rely on the longitudinal, cross-sectional data of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which has detailed questions on health insurance, as well as employer accommodations, including work schedules and work modifications.

This grant provides partial support to the University of Alaska, Anchorage for activities designed to recruit and retain indigenous graduate students in STEM disciplines as part of the university's participation in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) . This is the second three-year grant to the University of Alaska fund these activities. Principal Investigator Herb Schroeder and his staff had considerable success during their first grant, recruiting 26 students compared to an expectation of 18. Attrition has also been low, with the Alaska programs having lost only one M.S. and one Ph.D. student so far. Schroeder expects to recruit seven new students annually over the next three years. Some of the activities supported through this grant include cross-cultural training for faculty and staff who work with native graduate students, weekly team meetings, a recitation session devoted to strengthening the academic skills need to successfully complete graduate work, and workshops for helping students with professional networking, grant writing, and serving as an effective teaching assistant.

Funds from this grant support the development, production, and broadcast of three science-and-technology-themed documentaries by the PBS series American Experience. The three proposed documentaries include: "The Poisoner's Handbook," based on Deborah Blum's Foundation-supported book about the birth of toxicology and forensic science in the Jazz Age and how new crime-fighting techniques led to improvements in safety; "Robert Noyce, the Integrated Circuit and the Birth of Silicon Valley," based on Leslie Berlin's The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, a formative tale about one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century that has received relatively little exposure in the mass media; and "The Grand Coulee Dam" about the damming of the Columbia River-at the time, the largest concrete structure ever built-which transformed the Pacific Northwest. In addition, American Experience is proposing two interactive games to accompany the broadcast of "The Poisoner's Handbook."