The mining industry is especially water intensive, creating well-documented impacts on water quality and availability. Nevertheless, many of the newly proposed critical minerals and metals (CMM) mines around the country are located in water-scarce regions, each with complex and overlapping water policy frameworks that intersect with both federal and state regulations. This grant funds a project that aims to investigate underexplored questions related to critical mineral mining and water scarcity in the Great Basin region, a hydrologic basin centered in Nevada and covering much of the western United States, which is both water-scarce and mineral-rich, particularly in lithium. The region faces substantial CMM development interest, but there is also a long history of water conflict, resource extraction, and marginalization with the region's many Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. The research team will study how different mineral extraction methods might impact local water resources, ecosystems, and communities; how overlapping water governance structures might affect the siting and permitting for CMM mines; and how affected communities might respond in different ways. Grant funds will support seven mixed-methods case studies of mining communities across the Great Basin. Case study communities will span three Nevada counties and will address different mineral types, mine status (planned, permitted, and operating, including both low- and high-conflict cases), and extraction method. Case studies will combine document analysis with semi-structured interviews with a broad range of community leaders and members, regulators, and industry representatives. In addition to producing academic papers and policy briefs, the research team will also develop an interactive, online mapping platform that depicts the location of mining projects, Indigenous territories, land management jurisdictions, and stressed groundwater aquifers to help visualize the impacts of mining development at the individual mine and regional levels. Finally, the team will host three participatory community workshops to disseminate findings back to community members and to solicit input on alternative future approaches for equitable mine siting and benefit sharing.

Recent supply chain disruptions have highlighted the need for resilience in critical industries. Firms often prioritize efficiency over resiliency, leading to underinvestment in robust production methods. The CHIPS and Science Act passed by Congress in 2022 tasked the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with creating a National Technology Strategy. It also tasked the NSF’s new Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) with identifying and evaluating investments in key technologies. As is often the case, however, directives like this do not imply pre-existence of the expertise, methodologies, or even the data necessary to carry them out. Building on previous Sloan-funded research related to critical technologies and resiliency, Erica Fuchs will lead a research initiative on the techno-economics of critical industries and their supply chains, concentrating on developing exemplary methodologies, datasets, and meaningful research results related to the energy storage, semiconductors, and medical supplies industries. The multidisciplinary team includes experts on public policy generally and resiliency interventions in particular, economists to analyze firm reactions and societal implications, as well as engineers to assess interoperability in production methods and industry vulnerabilities. Based at Carnegie Mellon, the research team will bring together experts from institutions like MIT and Arizona State to regularly present results, comparing cross-case insights, challenges, and solutions, and to receive feedback from industry and government stakeholders and from an academic advisory board. The methods, data, and policy-relevant research developed from this initiative will help make the U.S. economy more resilient and potentially lead to whole new multidisciplinary fields or institutions devoted to critical technology assessment.

The Virtual Reality User Interface (VRUI) is an open-source platform for collaborative and immersive data exploration used at several research institutions. VRUI was uniquely designed from the beginning to be hardware-agnostic, and in recent years has been adapted to run on new generations of consumer VR headsets. This grant supports an ambitious plan to rebuild and better document the project’s configuration and interaction systems, substantially lowering the technical expertise required to run VRUI on a new dataset. To diversify the project’s supporters, this grant will support software contributions from and applications by labs at NIST and Villanova. While the data visualization aspects of VRUI are compelling in their own right, its ability to support multi-user, remote, real-time collaboration is perhaps even more exciting. Nearly all social VR platforms on the market are centrally hosted, requiring one to connect to servers run by Meta or other large companies to interact with others. At a time of potential consolidation of social VR into a small number of platforms, VRUI offers an alternative vision of locally managed social infrastructure in science (and beyond).

Abiogenesis is the process whereby life arose—or can arise—from nonliving matter. Somehow an assembly of chemicals containing information polymers bootstrapped itself up into a self-replicating system that grew in complexity over time. Rather little is known about how this chemical evolution can—and likely did—occur. This grant supports David Baum and David Beebe, Professors of Botany and of Biomedical Engineering, respectively, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in efforts to test the hypothesis that selection at the chemical ecosystem level—rather than at the level of individual molecules in a population—can yield ecosystems of (nucleic acid) information polymers that play complementary roles in promoting their collective propagation. Existing mathematical and computational models suggest that ecosystem-scale selection was important to abiogenesis. The term ‘selection’ refers to preferential survival owing to enhanced fitness in an environment. The term ‘ecosystem-scale selection’ refers to cases where the fitness serving as a basis for selection is a property of an ecosystem; here, a collection of chemicals. Ecosystem-scale selection naturally invokes the idea of a ‘container’ since containers offer a simple way of creating chemical systems that can compete with one another. In this project the container is an aqueous droplet; specifically, droplets containing different nucleic acid-based chemical systems that compete with one another for selection based on the droplets’ propensity to propagate (make more DNA/RNA). Some droplets will be discarded while others continue on in a series of experiments that allow the ecosystem in surviving droplets to evolve. The PIs aim to test the hypothesis that droplet-scale selection can lead to ecosystems of cooperating nucleic acid polymers that are particularly good at promoting their collective propagation. Baum and Beebe will perform experiments on various DNA/RNA ecosystems with an overall plan to create droplets containing a nucleic acid based chemical ecosystem, put the droplets through a series of incubate-select-propagate cycles, and then look for a response to selection by comparing the results of ‘selection’ and ‘control’ experiments. ‘Selection’ will be based on a fluorescent signal that indicates how much DNA/RNA has been synthesized and the bottom-lower-half droplets on the brightness scale will be discarded. Propagation will be achieved by splitting selected droplets in two and then fusing each ‘offspring’ droplet with a ‘food’ droplet. After a series of experimental cycles where droplets have been selected based on brightness, the PIs will turn to sequencing to rigorously determine whether there has been a selection effect by comparing the polymer-sequence-space obtained from droplet-selection experiments to the sequence-space of ‘control’ droplets (selected at random; irrespective of UV brightness). If successful, this project would provide the first direct experimental support for theoretical models which suggest that the emergence of cooperating sets of information polymers—and thus the genetic system of modern cells—is a result of selection on the emergent fitness of polymer-rich chemical ecosystems.

ARCH is a collaboration platform for small communities of intellectual inquiry. It integrates open source chat and videoconferencing tools with a sophisticated commenting and annotation engine for videos and transcripts, collaborative notetaking and document editing, and document sharing capabilities. In the wake of Covid-19 disruptions, the Santa Fe Institute realized that ubiquitous industry technologies like Zoom were ill-suited to extend into a hybrid space the rich collaborations and sub-communities that drive their research. In an effort led by SFI Vice President for Applied Complexity, Will Tracy, ARCH has been piloted successfully in a small number of events, including a 16-institution research network as well as a global SFI summer school. Funds from this grant support these activities, as well as the further development, documentation, research, and packaging of the ARCH platform so it can be used at wider scale both inside SFI and beyond.

Communal computing is a new computing paradigm in which people work together side-by-side in the real world, using their hands to create and explore computational models made of physical materials. In this project, a biotechnology lab will be restructured around communal computing, and a complete science project will be carried out in this new computing environment. The goal is to demonstrate an unprecedented level of visibility, agency, physicality and in-person collaboration. This effort aims to set the stage for a comprehensive transformation in how all scientists do their work together. This grant will support proof-of-concept use of the Realtalk system in a specific scientific context. Grant funds will support the construction of Realtalk communal computing environments which will be used by Shawn Douglas and others in his lab to advance the technology of DNA Origami.

Created by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) and first released in 2023, STRUDEL is a planning framework and design system of research software workflows that distills best practices in interface and user experience (UX) design discovered and refined from more than a decade of project work by LBNL researchers.  This grant provides funding for coordinated efforts between UC Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS) / LBNL, Superbloom, The Carpentries, and 2i2c to grow the awareness and adoption of STRUDEL among scientific software developers as the platform moves towards financial independence and sustainability.  Funded activities over the grant period include iterative expansion and improvement of STRUDEL based on community feedback, outreach to user communities from diverse institutions, development of platform infrastructure for training and outreach events, and new curriculum on UX design leveraging The Carpentries model.

The Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS) provides dedicated network-level resources to facilitate information sharing between Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in academic and research institutions. Having served a critical role in defining the landscape and onboarding Sloan’s grantees into a larger community of practice in which they can compare ideas and learn from each other, the CURIOSS team is positioning to thoughtfully grow the community well beyond non-Sloan-funded OSPOs, connecting those new entrants to best practices. With this multi-year grant, they will continue to hold space for candid information exchange via monthly community calls and yearly in-person meetings of the active members but will also grow opportunities to engage with external like-minded individuals, departments, and organizations. Finally, they will build on the success of their resource development, supporting individual members who volunteer to lead working groups to create case studies, training materials, and other collaboratively authored documents.

Over the past two years, the Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO) has encouraged open source software development at the University of Vermont by supporting hundreds of faculty and students on campus, engaging with close to 70 companies and local community organizations, building strong intra-university relationships with the offices of technology transfer and the Vice Provost for Research, and adopting a model for student-driven clinical work on specific open source development projects. This grant provides two years of continued support for these activities as VERSO moves towards institutionalization and independent sustainability as part of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute and the office of the Vice President for Research. Grant funds will provide continuing core operating support, as well as initial salary support for a new Research Software Engineer position. VERSO expects that, after the two-year runway of grant funding, a combination of dedicated internal funding, external grants, state/government partnerships, and industry support will cover all core operating costs, with student and software engineering support expanding elastically as demand increases.

This grant provides two years of continuing support for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Saint Louis University (SLU), as part of the Sloan Foundation’s ongoing efforts to institutionalize support for open source software in the research enterprise. SLU has found particular success in integrating open source into the student experience. Their key innovation has been in developing support for faculty-driven open source research software through a scaffolded system of paid graduate (masters) students who mentor undergraduate students participating in a capstone Computer Science class. In 2023, every graduating undergraduate Computer Science major at SLU engaged substantively with open source software development through this program. Grant funds will be used to continue these core activities as well as to expand and institutionalize the OSPO inside SLU.  Planned activities include transitioning the training for graduate students in practical open-source skills to a for-credit capstone/educational requirement. The leadership team also plans to develop revenue streams from both faculty-driven external grants and industry partnerships, and to develop a reserve fund to buffer against the ups and downs of external funding.