This grant provides partial support for a study by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that will report on the current expert consensus about the influence of systemic racism in academia on the careers of individuals belonging to racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in the scientific, technical, and medical workforce. The Academies will assemble a study committee of top experts to commission papers that synthesize the collective body of scholarship on this issue; develop practical, evidence-based recommendations to address the challenges the scholarship identifies; surface gaps in our understanding; and recommend an ambitious research agenda aimed to fill those gaps. This 21-month consensus study is a partial response to a request made by the Chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Congresswoman Edie Bernice Johnson. The Academies will plan a diverse variety of outreach and dissemination activities designed to ensure the report and its recommendations are circulated widely among key stakeholders and decision-makers inside and outside academia.

The National Book Foundation (NBF), which has for 70 years bestowed the prestigious National Book Awards, is launching a new “Science + Literature” program that aims to identify and honor outstanding books that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology, that celebrates and contributes to the diversity of voices in scientific writing, and that uses literature as a catalyst to create discourse and understanding through public programming. Each year, a diverse, independent five-person selection committee of well-known authors, scientists, and thinkers will select three outstanding books with scientific or technological themes or characters, published in the last three years. Winning authors will receive a cash prize of $10,000 and be celebrated at an annual awards event. NBF will also host three public events per year, or one per winning author.

This grant supports science and technology programming at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Foundation-supported programming will include screenings of Oscar nominated and winning films focused on science and scientists, a selection of talks and panel discussions with filmmakers and scientists, and an exhibit exploring the accomplishments of six Black visual effects artists. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, host of the Academy Awards and a membership organization for preeminent film professionals, is opening this new museum in Los Angeles as the definitive showcase devoted to the art, science, and myriad creators of cinema. It will occupy 300,000 square feet across two buildings, including six floors of exhibition galleries and public spaces and two theaters, and will reach an estimated 600,000 visitors in its first year.

This grant underwrites an annual fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography (the Center) at the City University of New York (CUNY) to support an author writing a biography of a scientist, engineer, inventor, or mathematician. The Center is the only academic institution in the country devoted to promoting the practice of biography. Founded in 2007, its mission is to foster excellence in biographical writing and to encourage the academy to understand biography as a scholarly and rigorous discipline. Fellows receive a one-time award of $72,000, a graduate research assistant, dedicated office space, and access to both the Center’s fellow biographers and CUNY’s science faculty as advisors. Additional grant funds support outreach to publicize the fellowship with relevant audiences. The current fellows are: Dr. Laura J. Snyder, writing a biography of neurologist Oliver Sacks; Miriam Horn, writing a biography of biologist and conservationist George Schaller; and Patchen Barss, writing a biography of mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose.

This grant supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) new podcast series, How to Fix the Internet, which explores the challenges posed by big tech and what consumers can do to protect themselves and their privacy and security. EFF is an international digital rights group focusing on technical tools, litigation, and public education. Over the course of two seasons of ten one-hour episodes, its new podcast will give listeners an awareness of and appreciation for the technologies that surround us every day, the policies and choices embedded in those technologies, and the role of corporations and laws in steering our digital world—allowing people to make more informed choices as they gain a deeper understanding of new technologies.

This grant provides three years of renewed support to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), for a series of activities, programs, and initiatives designed to encourage UCLA film students to engage with scientific and technological themes in their filmmaking and to produce science-themed films and screenplays. UCLA’s Sloan Foundation-supported activities include four annual prizes: a $30,000 production award; two $15,000 screenwriting awards; and a $15,000 episodic television award, as well as an annual colloquium that brings film students together with leading researchers to discuss the newest developments in science and technology. This grant also provides funds for dedicated scientific advisors to help students with their projects, independent judges to evaluate student submission, and faculty support and other operational costs associated with administration of the program.

This grant provides three years of continued support to the American Film Institute’s (AFI) efforts to encourage young screenwriters and filmmakers to write and produce compelling narrative films that explore scientific themes or have scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. AFI’s Sloan Foundation-supported activities include four annual prizes: a $25,000 production award; a $20,000 annual screenwriting award; a $25,000 development award; and a $45,000 tuition award. In addition, AFI holds a seminar series where established actors, writers, directors, and producers talk to students about science and Hollywood, and provides access to working scientists to serve as mentors on student scripts.

There are many complex societal questions associated with the development and deployment of negative emissions technologies, which are designed to remove carbon dioxide from the air, and solar radiation management technologies, which attempt to reflect sunlight from the atmosphere and thereby reduce warming. These include, but are not limited to, issues related to public perception and acceptance, willingness to site such novel technological infrastructure in different communities, and analyzing how costs and benefits might accrue differentially across populations. This grant will support high-quality social science research to understand community stakeholder views on negative emissions and solar radiation management in different regions of the country. Researchers will conduct interviews and focus groups across five geographically diverse regions where negative emissions or solar radiation interventions are likely to be located.  The multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research team, led by Holly Buck at the University of Buffalo, will supplement the local perspectives garnered through these interviews by fielding a nationally representative survey to examine public perceptions of both technologies and provide baseline information across a wide cross-section of the population. The team expects to produce up to six research papers that report on their results, train at least one postdoctoral scholar, and disseminate findings to practitioners and local communities.

The Clean Energy Program at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is one of the leading research efforts examining the energy innovation ecosystem in the United States. This grant, led by energy policy scholar David Hart, funds two projects at ITIF—one training, one research. The training project involves organizing a week-long energy innovation policy “boot camp” in 2022 in Washington, D.C. that will involve a cohort of approximately 20 early-career social scientists.  Participating researchers will be introduced to the practicalities of how energy policy is made and will encourage them to highlight the potential connections between research and decision-making in their own work. The second project involves advancing a collaborative research effort that ITIF is undertaking with scholars at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy (BU-ISE) and the BU-based Fraunhofer USA Center for Manufacturing Innovation (CMI) to examine the decarbonization potential of two industrial subsectors.  Researchers will conduct technical, economic, and policy analysis for each chosen subsector, and they will collect data and conduct interviews with industry and regulatory stakeholders that explore relevant energy innovation policy issues, such as financial incentive structures, global competitiveness, and innovation diffusion patterns. The research is expected to result in at least two reports and academic papers, and it will form the basis of a number of policy briefs that the team will provide to industry and governmental stakeholders.

Digital technology developments—including new technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things, and behavioral shifts like the rise in digital platform use—can have profound implications for energy and the environment. In 2018, the Foundation supported an emerging effort to study these impacts, and this grant supports the continuation and expansion of this network. Led by Reid Lifset at Yale University, Jordan Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kasantha Moodley and Dave Rejeski at the Environmental Law Institute, this research network is now known as the Network for Digital Economy and Environment (nDEE). Having already explored the direct effects of digital technologies on energy and the environment, they will now conduct research projects to explore the indirect effects of these digital technologies on energy systems. Three specific research projects will be supported at the outset, with a process designed to further source additional research ideas. The first project will study how the rise of short-term rental services like Airbnb is impacting carbon emissions. The direct effects on emissions through, say, increasing tourism, are well documented, but there are also indirect effects to consider, such as increased travel from Airbnb locations that may be located at the outskirt of cities, thereby increasing overall emissions. The second project will look at the energy implications of product returns. Many product life-cycle analysis calculations stop short of assessing what happens when a product is returned to the seller, and this analysis does not continue to follow a returned product’s continuing environmental impact beyond that point. The third project will seek to design improved personal environmental footprint calculators that integrate robust privacy preserving features. While exploring indirect effects is more challenging than exploring direct effects, completing this work will improve our understanding of how the digital economy contributes to global carbon emissions and what steps we might take toward reducing its impact.