This grant provides three years of continued support to the American Film Institute’s (AFI) efforts to encourage young screenwriters and filmmakers to write and produce compelling, engaging narrative films that explore scientific themes or have scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. AFI’s program includes three annual award programs: a $25,000 award given to the best student film project that brings science and technology to life; a $20,000 annual screenwriting award given to the best science-themed script; and a yearly tuition scholarship worth $45,000 given to an incoming graduate student with a background in the hard sciences who wishes to become a filmmaker and to incorporate scientific themes in his or her filmmaking. In addition, AFI holds a seminar series where established actors, writers, directors, and producers talk to students about science and Hollywood, and provides access to working scientists to serve as mentors on student scripts.

This grant, to the University of Southern California’s (USC’s) School of Cinematic Arts, provides three years of renewed support for a series of activities aiming to support student engagement with science as a subject matter in their work and to spur the development and production of science and technology film, television, and new media projects by USC film students. Supported activities include a $25,000 production award, given annually to the best student film project that features science and technology as a theme; two $17,500 screenwriting awards, given annually to the best student film or television scripts featuring science and technology as a theme; a $17,500 animation award, given annually to the best student animation project featuring science and technology as a theme; an annual $12,500 grant given to the most innovative student interactive game design project featuring science or technology as a theme; and a yearly seminar that brings USC film students together with leading scientists to discuss the power and potential of science as a vehicle in narrative filmmaking. In addition, grant funds will support a host of related support activities, including faculty mentoring, industry events, and dedicated science advisors to ensure accuracy of scientific content in student projects.

This grant provides three years of renewed support to the University of California Los Angeles, for a series of activities, programs, and initiatives designed to encourage UCLA film students to engage with scientific themes in their filmmaking and to produce science-themed films and screenplays. Funded activities include an annual colloquium that brings film students together with leading researchers to discuss the newest developments in science and technology; one annual, $30,000 production grant awarded to the best film project that incorporates scientific or technical themes; two annual $15,000 screenwriting awards given to the best student scripts incorporating scientific themes or featuring a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character; one annual, $15,000 filmmaking grant for the best episodic television project that explores scientific or technical themes; and the development of a screenwriting course open exclusively to students who are working on a science-themed project. The course will help students explore both the challenges and opportunities of incorporating scientific themes into narrative film and television. In addition, this grant provides funds for dedicated scientific advisors to help students with their projects, independent judges to evaluate student submission, and faculty support and other operational costs associated with administration of program.  

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.