The University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) program is a series of three-year grants to eight universities around the country that are working to transform graduate education to better serve Black, LatinX, and Indigenous doctoral students in STEM fields.  Grant funds primarily provide direct support to graduate students to be used in support of their studies.  The remaining funds support a diverse but interrelated set of resources designed to create an inclusive, connected, and supportive educational environment conducive to successful doctoral completion and subsequent career success.  These include faculty and peer mentoring, networking events, professional development seminars and resources, access to resilience counseling, a five-week research immersion program for incoming graduate students, and much more.   This grant provides three years of continued support to the UCEM housed at Duke University.  In addition to continuing its prior activities, the Duke UCEM team plans to implement new initiatives over the three year grant term to bring more academic departments at Duke into the UCEM and to further institutionalize the center’s recruitment and support activities as core functions at the university. The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering acts as the Foundation’s partner and fiscal steward for the program: verifying student eligibility, administering stipends, and collecting and tracking data on UCEM expenditures and outcomes.

Natural cells routinely use shape as a vector for acquiring and disseminating information about their environment.  Detecting the shape of a cell they have encountered can impart important information about their neighbor, and thus inform what sort of response would be most adaptive.  The underlying mechanisms that allow organisms to process this topological information, however, are not well understood.  This grant funds a multi-disciplinary a team led by Ronit Freeman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to better understand these mechanisms by attempting to create an artificial cell-like entity that mimics natural cells’ ability to detect shape.  Grant funds will support three interrelated research efforts. We know that cells use proteins to detect the shape of fellow cells, but the proteins that perform this function can be 10 to 100 times smaller than the cells they are measuring.  How these natural systems bridge that length gap is poorly understood.  Using advanced atomic scale microscopy, Freeman’s team will observe the behavior and structure of these shape-detecting proteins and attempt to reverse engineer synthetic versions that could perform similar functions in a synthetic cell. A second effort will focus on signal transduction, the process of converting shape data collected at the cell membrane into physical and biochemical signals that can be passed to a cell’s interior.  The research team will attempt to create synthetic pathways that mimic signal transduction mechanisms thought to operate in natural cells, allowing them to use detected topological information to effect changes in behavior of the synthetic cell itself.  Third, the team will use advanced techniques to model how topological information can spread through communities of cells, affecting the behavior or characteristics of entire cell collectives.  Such modeling has, to date, mainly confined itself to the chemical aspects of cellular communication. Freeman and her team will expand these efforts, incorporating physical variables such as the flow of mass and momentum, membrane elasticity, flow across interfaces, and cell deformation into their model.

A Cornell University team led by Paul McEuen has developed a fully artificial platform with some remarkable capabilities.  The platform's basic building blocks—magnetic digital polymers—are small panels (a few microns) with magnetic data lithographically patterned on their faces and sides. These data specify via magnetic forces how the panels interact with one another.  This ingeniously allows the panels to mimic the chemistry of biological molecules.  In biological molecules, the atoms that make up a molecule determine which other molecules it can chemically bond with and how strong such a bond, once formed, is.  By altering the data pattered on the faces of the digital polymers, McEuen and his team can replicate these features, with some polymers bonding selectively with others, just like biological molecules do.  What’s more, because the physics of magnetism is well-understood, the behavior of McEuen’s magnetic polymers should be relatively simply, at least in theory, to model and predict. This grant funds an effort by McEuen and his research team to attempt to use magnetic digital polymers to mimic two important features of biological life: reproduction and metabolism. To demonstrate "reproduction" McEuen and his team will begin by developing what they call Magnetic DNA, a digital magnetic polymer capable of replicating itself. Reproduction will be demonstrated by programming in appropriate magnetic interactions to create information strands (polymer patterns) that self-replicate under cyclic application of “agitation” via an external magnetic field, acoustic waves, and/or thermal excitation. To demonstrate "metabolism," the team will use a variety of strategies to create a magnetic polymer version of an enzyme, an entity that can modify the replicating unit. This will involve using magnetic and mechanical forces to cut linear polymer chains at specified locations, in analogy to how the CRISPER-Cas9 protein cuts DNA.

Speculation about the existence of other life in the universe has become invigorated in recent decades by an explosion in the discovery of extrasolar planets.  The numbers tell the story. There were about 50 known exoplanets in year 2000, about 500 known by 2010, and we're approaching 5,000 today.  Powerful telescopes can reveal information about the chemical composition of the atmospheres of these far away planets.  Can they also tell us if there is life there?  They could if the atmospheres of planets with biospheres differed systematically from the atmospheres of lifeless planets, Knowing that, however, would require knowing what the atmosphere of a lifeless planet looks like, and how life might change it. This grant funds an effort led by Anan Shahar at the Carnegie Institution for Science to determine the abiotic atmospheric baseline of the most common planets in our galaxy, sub-Neptune and rocky planets. With the abiotic baseline known, scientists can then consider how Earth-like life might change a planet's atmosphere and in this way tackle the question of whether or not it's possible to determine signatures of life by studying exoplanet atmospheres The research team will pursue an interdisciplinary, holistic approach that combines solid-planet expertise with atmospheric expertise in order to understand the baseline abiotic atmosphere of a planet and how it evolves over the planetary lifecycle.  What’s called a planet’s primary atmosphere is formed early in a planet’s  formation, as the planet coalesces from matter orbiting a local star.  This atmosphere then evolves into a secondary atmosphere, one shaped both by geologic processes on the planet itself (volcanism, magma oceans, outgassing, the weathering of the planet’s surface) and by external forces like comet impacts.  The research team will attempt to model and the analyze the effects of these forces, shedding light on how the atmospheres on lifeless planets are likely to evolve across the planetary lifecycle.  

This grant continues core operational support for the production and broadcast of Planet Money, National Public Radio’s (NPR) award winning media brand devoted to the production of accurate, accessible, and engaging reporting on the American economy. Planet Money is best known for its acclaimed twice-weekly podcasts, which take deep dives into the latest economic news and reached over one million downloads per episode during their first month. More recently, Planet Money launched a new, short-form economics podcast, The Indicator, which is produced daily and allows them to be more responsive to the news cycle. To date, The Indicator averages over 350,000 downloads in its first month, which brings the total monthly audience for Planet Money podcasts to nearly 1.4 million listeners. Grant funds will allow Planet Money to continue the production of more than 300 podcast episodes per year—approximately 100 new episodes of Planet Money and approximately 200 new episodes of The Indicator—as well as five to six episodes of its online video series, Planet Money Shorts, and 150 TikTok videos each year.

This grant supports the production and broadcast of two new technology-themed documentary films by American Experience, the long-running, award-winning history series produced by Boston television studio WGBH and distributed nationally on PBS. The first documentary, Black Death at the Golden Gate, looks at the scientific and social challenges posed by the threat of rampant disease through the true story of the outbreak of Bubonic Plague that hit San Francisco around 1900. Efforts to contain the disease were hampered by poor understanding of disease transmission, perceived threats to the city’s economic interests, and racially-biased assumptions about the nature and spread of the disease, as well as by an earthquake that roiled the city in 1906. The second documentary, The St. Francis Dam Disaster, tells a cautionary tale of one of the worst American civil engineering disasters, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in March 1928, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, the loss of millions of dollars, and the end of the career of pioneering Los Angeles civil engineer, William Mulholland. Occurring in a period when the control of water via massive engineering projects was transforming the American west, the disaster inspired a renewed emphasis on safety in dam siting and construction, including at the nascent Hoover Dam.

L.A. Theatre Works (LATW) produces high quality audio theater via staged readings by leading actors of some of the nation’s most exciting new plays. Plays recorded by LATW continue to have a life well after their theatrical runs and are broadcast on over 50 public radio stations across the U.S., on Radio Beijing in China, on the BBC World Service, via free online streaming and downloading, and through educational outreach to over 4,000 teachers and 14,000 community libraries. LATW’s Relativity series is a subset of its larger catalog that focuses on those plays that tackle scientific and technological themes. Two thirds of its 39-play Relativity catalog are plays that have been commissioned, developed, and/or produced by the Sloan Theater program. In addition to the recordings themselves, Relativity includes supplementary audio content, including interviews with directors and playwrights, and educational materials to help audiences further engage with a work’s scientific content and themes.  Funds from this grant will allow LATW to record and disseminate four new Sloan-developed plays as part of its Relativity series. Additional funds will support a project to remaster 12 plays in the existing catalog, bringing audio quality more in line with modern standards, and release them as podcasts for wider distribution.

Over the past 30 years, behavioral economists have succeeded in cataloging an impressive number of cognitive “biases” that manifest in how individuals make economic decisions.  These describe how real people defy the assumptions made about them in economic models. The big idea is that these biases are uniform enough across decision-makers that they can be incorporated into standard economic models, rendering the models both more accurate and more robustly predictive.  Behavioral macroeconomics is a growing field that seeks to incorporate these insights about human biases into attempts to model whole economies in a more realistic way.    Funds from this grant support a fellowship program run by Yuriy Gorodnichenko at the National Bureau of Economic Research that provides stipends to early career economists interested in conducting research in behavioral macroeconomics.  In addition to supporting the work of two fellows per year, Gorodnichenko runs an intensive every-other-summer “boot camp” to introduce new economics scholars to the concepts, methods, models and findings of behavior macroeconomics.  Topics addressed in the boot camp include the scarcity of attention, decision-making under incomplete information; the formation of expectations; optimal policy design in the presence of informational frictions; and interactions among agents with different levels of knowledge.  

The science of science is a burgeoning new multidisciplinary field that is attempting to rigorously measure and study the factors that drive scientific innovation and productivity.  Drawing from economics, public policy, sociology, history, management science, and information systems theory, researchers working in the science of science explore questions like: Can (just barely) failing to receive a big research grant be better for one’s career than winning one? Are some ways of structuring work in a lab more conducive to higher productivity than others? Can the decay rate of a scientific paper’s citations be predicted well enough to help measure the long-term impact and influence of relatively new work? And do great discoveries arrive randomly during a scientific career, or are there “hot streaks?” This sprawling new research community crosses departmental, methodological, and international boundaries.  Progress will require this community to coalesce around common standards, structures, norms, and infrastructure—particularly regarding data resources.  This grant funds efforts by Dashun Wang, director of Northwestern University’s Center for the Science of Science and Innovation, to help build community within and among science of science researchers.  Grant funds will be used to launch an annual international conference hosted by the National Academy of Sciences in 2022, planning activities for the launch of a new scholarly society dedicated to the Science of Science, and a small program of seed grants and research prizes designed to encourage diversity, data sharing, methodological training, and mentoring.

Seven of the ten most valuable businesses in the world are digital platforms. Their names are familiar to everyone: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Alibaba, Facebook, and Tencent. The user base for Facebook alone includes 2.7 billion people, more than the populations of India and China combined. Google processes more than 60% of online searches in the United States, and almost 90% of those in Europe. Such companies not only wield enormous economic power, they have increasing power over our social, political, and personal lives, too.  It is unsurprising then, that lawmakers of all kinds are interested in how to regulate such platforms in a way that would inhibit this power from being excercised contrary to the public good. The economics of these digital platforms, however, is complicated.  First, most of these platforms facilitate two-sided markets, serving two distinct customer bases.  Apple’s app store serves both consumers interested in finding interesting and useful apps, and app developers interested in finding customers to sell their creations to.  In such a situation, what counts as an optimal pricing strategy- and thus what counts as worrisome deviations from it—is complicated.  It may be rational and beneficial, for instance, for Apple to undercharge phone users and make up the loss by overcharging app developers.  Second, digital platforms are often dominated by network effects.  This term refers to those goods or services that become more valuable as more and more people use them.  Vendors want to sell their wares on Amazon because that’s where the customers are, and customers shop on Amazon because so many vendors sell on the site.  Funds from this grant support a project by Fiona Scott Morton at the Tobin Center at Yale to convene a multidisciplinary working group of leading scholars to produce a compelling research agenda that lays out the fundamental theoretical and empirical research needed to advance our understanding of the economics of regulating two-sided platforms.