Under the leadership of Michelle Barker, the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) is an organization devoted to ensuring that software is taken seriously as a research output alongside more traditional outputs like peer-reviewed papers and datasets.  Since software of all kinds is essential to nearly every aspect of scientific research, properly valuing and rewarding those who produce and maintain such software is vital to the efficient functioning of the systems of scientific knowledge production. ReSA will convene an international forum to help the science funding community better circulate strategies and approaches for the effective support of scientific software. Grant funds allow ReSA, with support from a part-time community manager, to establish this funders’ forum and produce resources covering relevant topics such as analyses of the research software funding landscape, key drivers for increased recognition of research software, and approaches to grantmaking practices and impact evaluations of investments. Following the forum, ReSA will share insights gained through blogs, white papers, and articles that further elevate the profile of research software across the research community.

This grant supports Mandл Holford, Jackie Faherty, and Ruth Cohen, three scientists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) who are spearheading a decadal project they are calling “2030STEM”. The initiative seeks to create changes in the STEM enterprise as it concerns building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment for BIPOC scholars. Housed at AMNH and lasting ten years, 2030STEM involves four focus areas simultaneously attempting systems level change: identifying, training and championing a cadre of Fellows; partnering with and seeking to extend the scale of existing successful equity and inclusion programs and organizations; creating financial incentives and access to capital for scholars of color in STEM and for collaborating institutions and companies that will be vested in the success of 2030STEM Fellows; and creating and implementing a novel and wide-reaching advocacy campaign to accelerate systemic change. As well as delivering results through these four focus areas during the ten-year projects, the team also intends for activities to be continued and developed through organizations with kindred missions.

This grant supports computer scientist Rediet Abebe at the University of California, Berkeley and economist Maximilian Kasy at the University of Oxford, who are organizing the Association for Computing Machinery’s inaugural conference focused on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization—EAAMO 2021. The virtual conference will convene experts from academia, government, and industry working on the computational tools and relevant economic or social science research required to address urgent societal problems. EAAMO 2021 seeks to foster community-bridging collaborations for addressing issues such as access to education and healthcare, interventions for alleviating poverty, as well as policies to promote fairness and privacy in labor markets.

This grant supports the production of Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda, a weekly podcast where the internationally acclaimed actor and science communicator interviews the nation’s leading intellectuals, scientists, artists, advocates, and thinkers.  Grant funds will support seven episodes of Clear+Vivid, now in its 14th season, to allow Alda to conduct interviews with scientists on a range of interesting and socially relevant topics, including AI, social cognition, brain trauma, robotics, neuroscience, psychiatry and optogenetics, philosophy in science, and forgetfulness. Episodes will be released through major podcasting platforms, on Clear+Vivid’s feed, and will be promoted by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, the nation’s leading science communication research, training, and education organization. The episodes will be released in late 2021 and early 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many technological shifts that have already been taking place, including the shift from in-person to online and hybrid (in-person and online) academic gatherings. Eliminating the need for travel reduces environmental impacts and the burden imposed on delegates, and videotelephony services have demonstrated that they can meet the basic needs required to bring a gathering online. But while videotelephony can handle presentations and Q&A sessions, it cannot recreate the serendipitous hallway conversations that can lead to new scientific collaborations, ideas, and discoveries.   This grant supports an investigation by Roger Schonfeld at Ithaka Harbors, doing business as Ithaka S+R, into the opportunities and drawbacks of online and hybrid academic gatherings. Schonfeld and his team will use a combination of research, interviews, and design thinking—a human-centered approach to innovation—to help approximately 15 academic societies plan better academic gatherings that are informed by what works well in online and hybrid gatherings. The team’s project will elucidate the new skills and technologies needed to foster the interactions that were easy to create with in-person gatherings, which they will then share with decision-makers to enable more sustainable, inclusive, and engaging options for scholarly communication.

This grant supports research by Philip Guo, cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego who is exploring questions around the cultural and communications gaps which occur between domain researchers and the computational staff in their employ. Questions Guo is investigating include how interpersonal power dynamics affect collaboration on research projects and how might these dynamics be addressed in order to better build and maintain open source software. Grant funds will allow Guo’s lab to employ a graduate student to assist with these research efforts.

The American Educational Research Association, in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, EducationCounsel, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Civil Rights Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Law, is undertaking a comprehensive research project to synthesize a large multidisciplinary body of knowledge aimed at documenting and quantifying the multiple ways that various forms of structural and systemic racism harm individual students and their educational outcomes. The project team will look at four broad areas of scholarship: physiology, biology, and genomics; mental health; identity science (which includes the study of phenomena like stereotype threat and microaggressions); and educational access, infrastructure, and pedagogy.  Though each of these fields has well-documented findings on the individualized impacts of racism on student outcomes, no attempt has been made to provide a synthesis that brings this diverse body of findings into a comprehensive whole. The proposed synthesis promises to provide a vital evidence-based resource that can inform discussion among educators, policymakers, courts, and the public about what scientific consensus has to say about the individual discrimination-based harms suffered by students and how to tailor fair and equitable college admissions and other educational policies in ways that are both cognizant of and responsive to these harms.

The Tor Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds and maintains a technology called Tor, which allows internet users to safeguard their online communication by routing  traffic through sets of distributed relays in ways that protect the identity of both the sender and receiver. The technology, most commonly used in a browser app (Tor Browser), relies on a network of over 6,000 volunteer-run relays, and Tor is investing in tooling and community outreach to shore up this key piece of internet infrastructure. This grant partially supports Tor’s strategic foci for the coming year: investment in the relay network, a re-implementation of the network in the open-source Rust language, user training and support, and general data collection on network-level internet censorship.  

Transportation is one of the primary contributors to U.S. carbon emissions, which is why encouraging drivers to switch to electric vehicles (EVs) is an important part of lowering those emissions. Financial incentives, like subsidies or tax rebates, have been shown to be effective at improving adoption of electric vehicles, but many incentive designs are economically inefficient and primarily benefit high-income drivers. Tax credits, for instance, benefit those who can afford the full up-front purchase price of an EV and are able to wait for the credit to arrive later at the end of the tax year. Moreover, available data on the effectiveness of incentive programs are largely historical, meaning they are predominantly based on the behavior of early adopters, who tend to be both whiter and wealthier than the population as a whole. This grant supports work by John Helveston of George Washington University who will field a survey that will measure consumer preferences for different EV financial incentive features to gain insight from a more diverse population than is reflected in currently available data. The survey will ask respondents to choose among different alternative options that can be used to encourage EV adoption. In this case, the survey will ask about different incentive design features, such as the amount of the incentive, how it is provided (for instance, as a sales tax exemption, tax credit, deduction, or rebate), who is providing it (such as a government entity or car dealer), and when it is provided (such as at the time of sale or during annual tax filing). The survey will be distributed to at least 2,000 U.S. vehicle buyers of varying age, income, and race via an online platform. It will also collect other relevant data, such as the size of the car that the respondent plans on purchasing or whether they are looking to purchase a new or used vehicle. The resulting data, which will be among the most detailed of its kind, will be used to analyze how alternative incentive design features (or combinations of features) might differentially affect consumer behavior across different demographic groups.