Each year since 1973, the Sloan Public Service Awards have recognized six outstanding civil servants out of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for New York City government. The Fund for the City of New York manages the nomination and selection process and refers to the awards as “the Nobel Prizes of Government…, the highest award that can be bestowed upon a New York City public servant.” Nominated by their colleagues and selected by a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished New Yorkers, each of the six winners receives a $10,000 cash prize and is honored at individual celebrations at their workplaces and at a city-wide celebration presided over by the Mayor. This grant provides three years of continued support for the Sloan Public Service Awards.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the administration of the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards, an annual awards program run by the Council for Economic Education that recognizes outstanding financial and economics education by secondary school teachers in the New York City metropolitan area. Winners are selected by an independent committee based on a number of diverse factors, including their effectiveness, creativity, and success in motivating underserved students. Winners receive a $5,000 cash prize, $2,500 to be used to augment economic education programs at their respective schools, and are honored at a high-profile event in New York City.

The Center for Mathematical Talent (CMT) was established in 2010 at New York University's prestigious Courant Institute for Mathematics.  Its mission is to identify, motivate, and nurture those underserved and underrepresented students in New York City schools who could excel in mathematics.  This grant provides three years of continued support for the activities of the CMT, including partnering with other educational organizations to set up satellite programs for students unable or unwilling to travel to Manhattan, training public school teachers and others to run extracurricular programs like “math circles,” and developing educational materials, like math games, designed to present mathematics in ways that are challenging, fun, and engaging.  In addition, CMT plans over the next three years to double the numbers of students and instructors reached; diversify its sources of support; restructure its website to better serve its core audiences, and refine its data collection procedures so as to better measure program impact.

Funds from this grant provide three years of continued support for two programs at the City University of New York aimed at supporting faculty and students in STEM disciplines. The first, CUNY's Summer Undergraduate Research Program (C-SURP), provides talented undergraduates with the opportunity to engage in hands-on, in-the-lab research, assisting CUNY science faculty with ongoing research projects during the summer. Grant funds will support 10 students in each of 2015, 2016, and 2017, providing a $4,000 housing allowance and a $4,000 living stipend to each student. The second supported program under this grant is CUNY's Junior Faculty Research Award in Science and Engineering (J-FRASE) program, which supports promising early-career STEM faculty at CUNY with a $50,000 fellowship for use in research. Over the course of the next three years, 12 faculty will receive fellowships through this grant.

Infectious disease expert Ian Lipkin, M.D., the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University studied the microbial profiles of 133 rats in lower Manhattan and determined that they harbor multiple human pathogens.  This grant supports Lipkin as he expands this study to mice.  Lipkin will examine the microflora of 100 mice from each of 16 densely populated areas of New York City in order to determine what bacteria, fungi, and viruses are present in native NYC mice and whether the distribution of these microoganisms  differ by borough, season, or socioeconomic status of the surrounding human population.  The project has the potential to identify both known and novel pathogens in rodent vectors, provide insights into otherwise unexplained diseases by revealing links to infection with rodent-borne pathogens, and build support for rodent control.  The new knowledge will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at scientific and medical meetings.