This grant provides funds to the Science Festival Alliance (SFA)—a network and incubator of science festivals across the country—to promote the development and expansion of 12 science festivals across the United States in communities with small resource bases and with a focus on promoting diversity. SFA will select and recruit four leading festivals; they will spend the first year experimenting with different approaches to improving diversity. Each lead festival would create a customized plan for engaging diverse audiences with measurable indicators for progress that would be evaluated after 12 months. This new knowledge would then be applied in selecting the 12 new partners—each lead festival is responsible for recruiting and mentoring three new festival partners in communities with small resource bases. The 12 selected festivals would be given modest $2,000 professional development grants and then be eligible for $10,000 challenge grants as they develop their own plans. Grant funds support these activities and associated administrative and operational costs.

This grant supports the WNYC Health Unit’s ongoing coverage of health care policy, health economics, and the complexities and contradictions of the U.S. health care system. Over the three-year grant period, Sloan funds will help WNYC produce 45 to 50 broadcast segments each year on a range of health topics including the Affordable Care Act under the Trump administration, the opioid and obesity epidemics, and the gap in hospital billing between what hospitals charge and the real costs of care. Segments will be aired on several of NPR’s most popular radio programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, The Takeaway, and the Brian Lehrer Show. In addition to these weekly segments, WNYC will produce two to three episodes of its Only Human podcast each year. The long-form serial podcast allows WYNC to take a deeper dive into complex health care issues, with a focus on extensive research, immersive storytelling, and rich characters. WNYC will also convene annual workshops, bringing together leading health care practitioners, economists, and policy experts to discuss the health care system and potential reforms. Last, grant funds will support a new radio drama, produced in collaboration with Radiolab, on the life and work of John Bonica, an anesthesiologist and a world champion wrestler also known as the “father of pain management.”

This grant to the Catticus Corporation provides support for the production and broadcast of a one-hour documentary special on driverless cars, “Look Who’s Driving,” that will explore both the promise and pitfalls as we move toward adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In addition to explaining the major technological advances that have enabled progress in AVs—mapping, sensing, and artificial intelligence—the series will explore the engineering, legal, regulatory, security, privacy, and ethical challenges behind this much-ballyhooed potential revolution in transportation. The documentary will include interviews and commentary from leading technologists and engineers working on AVs, as well as scholars, historians, research scientists, and ordinary citizens. The show is slated to be broadcast on the PBS series, NOVA.

Funds from this grant support efforts by Consumer Reports (CR) to provide consumers with the knowledge and tools they need to make more informed choices about their digital privacy. Supported activities include refining the Digital Standard, an evaluative framework used to objectively rank consumer products based on how well they perform on security architecture, data collection, and user control over his or her own data. CR will bring together academics, thought leaders, technical experts, and industry players to review and suggest improvements to the platform. It will draw on its Consumer Insights Panel, a web-based tool that interacts with 4,500 consumers to inform more effective messaging and education strategies. CR will then use the revised Digital Framework to evaluate major technology platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. Finally, CR will publish its findings in a report to help inform future consumer choices and industry product development. The overall effort is designed to establish privacy as a core consumer value and to drive competition regarding who can do the best job protecting consumer privacy and individual ownership of data.

This grant supports a study examining whether the upgrading of existing electricity transmission lines can obviate the need to build new transmission infrastructure corridors. Under the leadership of Principal Investigator Granger Morgan, the research team will study different transmission line upgrading options, including re-engineering existing transmission lines to improve their carrying capacity or switching from high-voltage alternating current (HVAC) lines to high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines. Data will be collected from state public utility commissions about proposed or planned transmission line upgrades. This information will then be analyzed using an engineering model of the transmission system to understand which transmission line corridors might be best suited to upgrading or current conversion based on their technical and economic specifications.

Innovation in the energy sector often comes from unexpected places, utilizing research on problems or issues that are not directly energy related but that turn out to have application in the energy sector. Understanding these “knowledge spillovers,” as they are called, is critical to gaining a complete picture about how new energy technologies evolve over time. This grant funds a project led by Venkatesh Narayanamurti of Harvard University, Laura Diaz Anadon of the University of Cambridge, and Gabriel Chan of the University of Minnesota to investigate how knowledge spillovers contributed to three different low-carbon technologies—solar photovoltaics, lithium-ion batteries, and solid state lighting. The team will analyze patent data from the PATSTAT database to determine which innovations from other fields have led to significant advancements for the three aforementioned technologies. The researchers will then supplement this patent citation analysis with a bibliometric analysis of academic publications and with additional expert interviews and consultations. The team will then use existing engineering cost models to identify how various innovations from outside the energy sector contributed to cost reductions for each of the three technologies under study. In addition to academic research, the research team will prepare shorter commentaries and policy briefs aimed at informing policymakers and other nonspecialists about research results.

Pecan Street is an independent nonprofit organization that is a leading provider of high-resolution residential energy use data to the research community. Through its testbed of volunteer instrumented homes, Pecan Street is able to collect disaggregated circuit-level energy use information at 15-minute, 1-minute, and, increasingly, 1-second intervals. This unique data set is then provided free of charge to the academic community, helping facilitate research known as nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM), which allows scholars to disaggregate household-level energy use based on the unique power “signature” of each monitored appliance. Funds from this grant will allow Pecan Street to expand their data collection efforts through three interrelated projects. First, they will increase the number of homes within their existing test-bed in Austin, Texas that collect energy use data at 1-second intervals. Second, they will integrate additional data from Independent System Operators (or ISOs) around the country—information such as wholesale market pricing, forecasting, and generation information—that enriches the energy use data collected from the Pecan Street testbed. Third, Pecan Street will expand the number of instrumented homes in its network, adding in 100 additional homes in both upstate New York and the Bay Area of California.

This grant renews funding for a set of predoctoral fellowships in energy economics. In each of the past three academic years, Meredith Fowlie (University of California, Berkeley) and Ryan Kellogg (University of Chicago) have led a committee that solicits applications and selects a number of young academics for these two-year predoctoral fellowships. Selected fellows are generally in the final two years of their doctoral program and are conducting one or more studies examining different dimensions of the energy system. Previous fellows have come from an array of universities, including the University of Tennessee; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of California, San Diego; and Cornell University, among others. The announcement for predoctoral fellowship applications is shared widely within the economics community, and the selection committee has received approximately 20 high-quality applicants each year. Funds from this grant will fund an additional two cohorts of three fellows each. In addition to covering stipend and tuition coverage, a small amount of money is provided for purchasing necessary data and for travel to professional meetings.

The OXIDE project, based at the Johns Hopkins University, aims to advance diversity and inclusion throughout the academic career ladder in chemistry. OXIDE collects data, disseminates it to the broad chemistry community, and holds department chairs accountable for their success or failure to promote diversity in their departments. This “top-down” strategy to promote change has been shown to be successful for industry. OXIDE’s accountability strategy is largely executed at NDEW, the National Diversity Equity Workshop, an intensive two-day meeting that has been held biennially by OXIDE since 2011. Funds from this grant will support two more NDEWs, in 2019 and 2021, and the annual publication and dissemination of data on diversity equity statistics in chemistry for four years. OXIDE’s target objectives for the project period include the participation of approximately 60 chemistry department chairs in the biennial NDEW, an increase in chairs’ proficiency in the value proposition for advancing diversity and addressing known barriers to diversity equity; an increase in departmental efforts that are managed by the chair that advance local diversity equity outcomes; and a transition in organizational funding from heavy reliance on grant support to substantial reliance on funds provided by the institutions of the participants.

Funds from this grant provide support for three years of continued operation of the New York Academy of Science’s Science Alliance Leadership Training (SALT) program. The program aims to provide leadership training to a yearly cohort of 30 early-career scientists drawn from members of the NYAS Science Alliance. Cohorts are intentionally selected to promote diversity and prior cohorts have included significant numbers of women and underrepresented minorities. Supported activities for each cohort include a five-day intensive workshop followed by monthly webinars for nine months to expand and reinforce leadership skills. Additional funds will support a longitudinal analysis of program participants to enable rigorous evaluation of program impacts.