Most home heating systems involve burning natural gas or oil. However, a less carbon-intensive technology is becoming more readily available: electric heat pumps. Heat pumps can provide heating services through interchanges with the ambient air or from the ground. Heat pumps have become increasingly more efficient than conventional oil or gas systems, with the potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This grant funds a multi-institutional project led by economist Yueming Lucy Qiu at the University of Maryland, College Park, engineer Parth Vaishnav at Carnegie Mellon University, and economist Pengfei Liu at the University of Rhode Island that will examine the economic and engineering tradeoffs associated with heat pump installation. Qiu and her team have procured access to a detailed dataset drawn from Zillow, the popular real estate website, that contains records on nearly four million homes with heat pumps installed, the most extensive dataset on heat pumps that is readily available. Analyzing the Zillow data, Qiu and her team will examine how heat pump installation impacts home property values and how federal, state, and local incentive policies impact consumer decisions to install heat pumps. The team plans to produce a number of academic articles on these topics for both social science and engineering journals, and the dataset will be made available for other scholars for their own analyses.

The Handbook on Diversity and the Law: Navigating a Complex Landscape to Foster Greater Faculty and Student Diversity in Higher Education is a comprehensive handbook for college and university administrators that provides practical, actionable guidance on how to design effective, legally compliant programs that advance diversity. Originally produced in 2010 with the help of a Sloan Foundation grant, the Handbook needs an update that reflects the myriad changes to the legal landscape since its publication. This grant to the American Association for the Advancement of Science provides funding for that purpose.   The Handbook on Diversity and the Law Edition 2 will add descriptions and analyses of recent court and agency decisions and changes to federal policy; provide new suggestions for process management, governance, structural barrier removal, and communications; and operationalize these resources through new user-friendly tools and training materials.

This grant funds a joint effort by Barnard College and Columbia University’s School of Engineering to prepare undergraduate women to succeed in an accelerated M.S. degree program in engineering. Selected students will complete a four-year undergraduate major at Barnard coupled with a one-year master’s degree at Columbia Engineering, for a “4+1” program. Students from racial and ethnic groups traditionally underrepresented in engineering will be a special target for recruitment into the program, particularly those from low-income families. Four cohorts of eight students each will receive support across their junior and senior years at Barnard and their master’s year at Columbia. Barnard and Columbia Engineering will build a comprehensive structure of support for students in the program, including direct faculty advising, well-delineated paths for academic courses beginning in the junior year, career counseling, cohort-level support, and financial aid to encourage participation and success. All students will be guaranteed support for summer research experiences for two years, research-based cohort activities, and intensive faculty advising. Nine diverse scholastic pathways have been identified through the program to date, including mapping a major in chemistry to an M.S. in chemical engineering, and opportunities for math, statistics, economics, computer science, or physics majors to earn one of five M.S. degrees in the Columbia Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

The Institute on Teaching and Mentoring is an annual 3.5-day professional development conference for underrepresented minority doctoral students and recent Ph.D. recipients. Organized by the Southern Regional Education Board, the Institute is the single largest gathering in the country of underrepresented scholars pursuing advanced degrees. It presents an unrivaled opportunity for building community with and among such scholars and for addressing their specific educational and professional needs. The Institute also plays a central role in the Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. program. More than 150 scholars supported through the Sloan University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring attend each year. Attendees hear plenary speakers talk on substantive issues in graduate education and may choose from a large variety of workshops addressing topics across every stage of the educational pipeline, from the challenges of adapting to graduate study as a first-year student, to dissertation guidance, to making informed choices about the job market. The Institute also offers programming designed to build community among attendees, forge professional connections, celebrate the achievements of scholars, and introduce attendees to professional mentors and recruiters.  Funds from this grant provide partial support for the Institute for a period of four years.

This grant provides five years of support to the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY) to offset administrative and organizational expenses associated with the Sloan Awards for Excellence in Teaching Science and Mathematics, an annual awards program that honors exceptional math and science teachers working in New York City’s public high schools. Each year FCNY conducts a city-wide search for superb nominees from all five boroughs. Seven winners are selected by an expert panel of distinguished New Yorkers and winners are then honored at a city-wide celebration presided over by the chancellor of the NYC Department of Education. Winners receive a cash award of $5,000 and their schools each receive an award of $2,500 to augment their educational offerings.

This grant supports efforts by the Council for Economic Education (CEE) to attract a more diverse pool of individuals to economics by exposing precollege students to high-quality economics education. Grant funds support the Alfred P. Sloan Teaching Champion Awards, an annual program for recognizing innovative, effective high school economics teachers in the New York City metropolitan area. Winners receive $5,000 and their schools receive an additional $2,500 to enhance the economics curriculum. Winners are also celebrated at CEE’s annual Visionary Awards dinner each October, an event popular with leaders in business, education, economics, and the media. Additional grant funds support a series of three-day training boot camps and other online and in-person professional development programs that reach over 55,000 teachers per year, two-thirds of whom teach in schools serving students from low-income families. Last, CEE hosts the New York Economics Challenge, an annual quiz-bowl-style competition that helps students discover and develop a passion for economics. The grant’s funds support these and related activities for a period of three years.

In 2008 Ben Dubin-Thaler, a passionate science educator and entrepreneur, purchased an old New York City bus, outfitted it with state-of-the-art microscopy, developed a curriculum, and started visiting local schools. The result was the BioBus, a fully mobile research laboratory that brings a science field trip to school and community groups, with a focus on delivering high-quality science education to underserved communities. Since 2008, the organization has grown considerably, adding and outfitting a second bus and establishing two local community education centers (called BioBases), one on the Lower East Side and one in Harlem. BioBus also increased the breadth of their educational services by launching an internship program for high school and college students and a 12-week after school learning curriculum for interested middle and high schoolers. Since its founding, BioBus has brought innovative, fun science education to an estimated 250,000 students at more than 500 New York City schools. Funds from this grant support efforts to expand the number of students participating in BioBus programs over the next three years while creating the physical, fundraising, and evaluation infrastructure to ensure sustainable future growth. Funded activities include efforts to increase BioBus’s capacity to provide science research and mentorship opportunities; complete a three-year evaluation plan of the internship program that will provide data and insights to maintain program excellence while expanding capacity, and create a sustainable business plan for increased government support.

This grant provides one year of support to the PBS NewsHour to continue its regular broadcast of Making Sen$e with Paul Solman, a biweekly segment that explains business and economic issues clearly and engagingly to a general audience both on air and online. Grant funds support the production of 25 7-to-10-minute Making Sen$e broadcast segments on major issues facing the American and global economy, such as how populism and the Trump administration are reshaping economic policy, how to interpret the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report, how the Federal Reserve works, the impact of new corporate tax breaks on the deficit, and trends in the job market, wages, and money management. Additional grant funds will support the production of hundreds of original pieces of web native content that deepen and extend the issued covered in Solman’s on-air segments.

This grant provides funding to National Public Radio for production of the Planet Money podcast and a series of related initiatives designed to bring deeply reported stories on key economic issues to a general audience in an accurate, accessible, and engaging way. Over the next two years, grant funds will support production of the twice weekly Planet Money podcast as well as production of the Indicator, a podcast covering economic and business events in the news which is broadcast every weekday. In addition, grant funds will support the production of 12 online videos in the Planet Money Shorts series; 16 pieces of deep-dive written reporting; a live Planet Money event; and extended outreach to increase social media engagement, expand the Planet Money newsletter, and promote use of Planet Money content in America’s classrooms.

This grant provides support to WGBH Educational Foundation to research, produce, and broadcast four science- and technology-themed episodes on its popular, award-winning documentary history series American Experience. The four shows are “The Poison Squad,” based on Deborah Blum’s book about Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose dogged efforts to test the health effects of popular chemical food additives led to modern standards of food safety; “The Man Who Tried to Feed the World,” about Norman Borlaug, an Iowa agronomist who introduced innovative breeding techniques for wheat and overcame many obstacles to help feed millions in Mexico, Pakistan, and India; “The Codebreaker,” about Elizabeth Smith Friedman, cryptanalyst-in-charge for the U.S. Treasury Department, whose codebreaking skills helped bring down a Nazi spy network in South America; and “Mr. Tornado,” about Tetsuya Theodore “Ted” Fujita, professor of meteorology at the University of Chicago, who proved that tornadoes were not random but predictable and whose discovery of microbursts—intense downdrafts that caused airplanes to suddenly drop from the sky—led to life-saving advances in aviation.