This grant provides funding to extend a project by Laura Dabbish of Carnegie Mellon University to study women’s participation in open source software projects. Combining qualitative interviews with network analysis of large-scale project data from GitHub, Dabbish broadens the definition of “participation” beyond code commits, cataloged the various ways software projects telegraph openness to new contributors, and hypothesized that gendered difference in the social network structures men and women create explain why women on average disengage from open source participation earlier than men. Grant funds will allow Dabbish to expand her work to other open source software ecosystems while also probing the gender dynamics of “maintainers,” those leaders in open source projects responsible for the technical and social “invisible work” that holds a project together. In addition, Dabbish and her partners will pilot an extension of their methods to the study of other underrepresented minorities in open source, starting with the experience of U.S.-born Black women contributors.

Open source software (OSS) is an increasingly vital component of the scientific research enterprise, used in one form or another at every point in the research pipeline, from instrument calibration, to data collection and cleaning, to analysis and visualization, to archiving.  The centrality and importance of OSS has led to the realization within academic institutions of the need for formal mechanisms to identify and support those OSS projects most central to its researchers.  One model being explored is the creation of university Open Source Programs Offices (OSPO), special intra-university bodies charged with the support of important open source software.    This grant funds an innovative OSPO-like effort at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), led by Steven Jacobs.  The initiative, called Open@RIT, helps university researchers secure funding for OSS work, enlists undergraduates to work directly with RIT faculty on OSS projects, collects data on faculty involvement with OSS, and supports the creation of documentation and other resources that are essential to effective OSS projects.  Grant funds will support the salary of an office staff member to provide administrative support as well as funding for a pool of undergraduate students who wish to work on faculty OSS projects. The grant will help the Open@RIT effort grow, build relationships across the university, and publicize dependence of many campus activities on open source software.  The team also plans to develop a playbook for other institutions interested in launching similar efforts on their own campuses.

In early 2020, Carol Tenopir (University of Tennessee) and Dave Nicholas (CIBER) completed a four-year longitudinal study of early career researcher (ECR) practices across the natural and social sciences.  Drawing on more than 350 hours of interviews with 100 early career researchers in China, France, Poland, Malaysia, Spain, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S., the findings ranged from the expected to the surprising: for instance, young researchers were nearly universally indifferent to using altmetrics to measure scholarly impact, and they showed little interest in publishing in Open Access journals, despite widespread dissatisfaction with existing academic regimes of publication and promotion.  Funds from this grant will support the extension of Tenopir and Nicholas’s work, with an emphasis on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the research and communications practices of young researchers around the globe.

The PHD Excellence Initiative (PHDEI) at New York University aims to help undergraduate students of color craft academic records, especially in math and economics, that make them competitive for admission into top economics doctoral programs. Led by of Peter Blair Henry, William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Finance and Dean Emeritus of the NYU Stern School of Business, the PHDEI is an intense, individualized two-year asset-building fellowship with encouraging initial results.  Henry personally trains and mentors every fellow supported by the program, serves as their advocate inside the university, and tailors his efforts to the specific needs of each fellow. The program includes weekly scheduled meetings, research activities, GRE prep strategy, advice on course selection, support ub navigating the graduate school admissions process, and. where possible, the publication of a fellow’s research findings in a peer-reviewed journal.  Initial results have been promising, with five of six fellows securing admission into one of the nation’s top economics graduate programs. Funds from this grant provide partial support for the continuation of PHDEI.  In addition, grant funds will be used to create a mentor training program aimed at helping interested institutions start successful PHDEI programs of their own. 

The Sloan Public Service Awards are an annual awards program that recognizes six outstanding public servants in New York City. Launched by the Fund for the City of New York in 1973, the awards are the only comprehensive attempt to recognize, honor and celebrate the extraordinary contributions of the more than 325,000 people who work in New York City government. Each winner--often a lifetime civil servant who has given decades to the city—receives a $10,000 prize and is celebrated individually at workplace ceremonies and jointly at a gala held in the historic Cooper Union. Funds from this grant support the continuation of the Sloan Public Service Awards for a period of five years.  

Funds from this grant support a pair of projects aimed at understanding the role that attention and inattention play in consumer behavior and decision-making. In the first, economist Nick Netzer of the University of Zurich will develop the beginnings of a theoretical framework that treats attention as a relatively-fixed resource that decision-makers allocate as they move through the world and make decisions. Netzer will work to incorporate insights from psychology and neuroscience into standard economic decision-making models, allowing a more nuanced, psychologically realistic account of how humans make decisions, one that has the potential to more gracefully explain common behavioral phenomena, like why decisions made in a rush or while multi-tasking tend to be non-optimal. In the second phase of the project, Netzer will partner with behavioral neuroscientist Phil Tobler to test his framework. Tobler has designed a series of experiments that aim to quantify how increases in subjects’ attentional resources, occasioned by the administration of low-dose attention-enhancing drugs, affect their performance on decision-making tasks. The experiments will be able to demonstrate whether increased attentional resources improve decision-making in the ways predicted by Netzer’s models.

The interior of a cell is a chaotic, turbulent place dominated by random, thermally driven collisions.  Inside this tempest, the internal structures of a cell must do their delicate work.  The creation of a single strand of mRNA, essential for creating the proteins that make cells run, requires the meticulous assembly of long sequences of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil.  Yet despite the ever present internal squall and the exacting nature of the work, these cellular processes have surprisingly low error rates.  The chance of a transcription error inside e. coli bacteria, for example, has been observed to be about 1 in 10,000.      Explaining how such high accuracy is achieved under such adverse conditions is an enduring challenge for biology.  This grant funds a series of experiments designed by Rockefeller University’s Gregory Alushin, Amy Shyer, and Shixin Liu that explore one promising explanation: mechanical force. Alushin, Shyer, and Liu will use grant funds to field two research projects that use emerging technologies, such as high-resolution imaging and tools that apply and measure nanoscale forces, to explore the role played by mechanical force in two areas of biology. In the first, Alushin, Shyer, and Liu will work at the nanoscale to test the hypothesis that force influences the fidelity of the molecular machine that executes the primary step in gene expression, the copying of genetic information from DNA to RNA (transcription). This multiprotein machine is called RNA polymerase (RNAP) and the project team hypothesizes that force can cause RNAP to adopt structures that favor error correction during transcription. To test this, the team will exert forces on RNAP and measure the resulting error rates and structures. In the second project, the team will examine the role of force in morphogenesis, the development of heterogeneity in an initially uniform collection of cells (e.g., tissue) that underlies organ development. The team will use force manipulation and imaging to directly probe how force propagates across tissue-scale lengths while also mapping how force drives the molecular-scale rearrangements that launch gene expression. Here the principal investigators hypothesize that force propagates at a speed that exceeds what’s possible in models of chemical-signal propagation.

Established in 2014, the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) at the University of Michigan systematically collects, cleans, compiles, and curates administrative data from universities about their grant spending, including financial and HR records. IRIS then links these datasets with patenting, publishing, and other important information sources, notably confidential Census files. Using state-of-the-art privacy protection techniques, IRIS makes aggregate statistics available to the university community, while also making detailed microdata available to qualified researchers for further exploration. For example, IRIS researchers have traced how a particular grant supported a particular lab that hired a particular student who went on to publish papers, file patents, and start a company in the same particular field. Assembling this kind of information in bulk for statistical study has been the dream of generations of scholars concerned with innovation and of policymakers and administrators interested in evaluating the return on investments in research. Funds from this grant provide two years of operational support for IRIS, with a particular emphasis on projects to collect and analyze data that will advance our understanding of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on research activities within universities. Additional funds will support outreach activities aimed at helping IRIS expand its roster of partner universities and grow the number of affiliated scholars working to analyze the data collected.