Funds from this grant support a field project that aims to separate and quantify the sources, pathways, and fates of carbon that originated as mantle rock or as sedimentary biomass. The location of the fieldwork is west of Costa Rica, where the seafloor sinks or “subducts” beneath the Caribbean plate. A team led by Peter Barry of the University of Oxford will look closely at this subduction zone to see to what extent the burial of microbes (organic material rich in carbon) on the slab during oceanic sedimentation is a one-way road to death. Prior research estimates that 85 percent of the subducted carbon sinks under the tremendous pressure of gravity and the overlying plate into the deep, lifeless mantle, but recent measurements have detected unusually high carbon dioxide degassing from the zone. This opens the possibility that quite a lot of “biotic” carbon in deep seafloor mud might recycle as surface life. The project is a continuation of ongoing work by Deep Carbon Observatory scientists to probe the limits to life and accurately characterize the outer bound of pressures and temperatures that are nonlethal to some environmental microorganisms.

This grant continues support to the Data Science Team of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), which provides data and computational infrastructure and services to the DCO membership. Led by Peter Fox at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Data Science Team provides key services to the DCO. Supported activities include the development and progressive improvement of deepcarbon.net, management of the DCO’s scholar database, and hosting an archive of all DCO plans, policies, publications by member scholars, and scientific data collected or generated by hundreds of individual DCO research projects. In addition, the team is responsible for the DCO’s data science efforts, working with the community to turn DCO data into a searchable corpus that can be agglomerated and analyzed to reveal new geoscientific insights. Finally, the Data Management team is a crucial player in the larger effort to synthesize a series of deep Earth carbon models from knowledge gained from the DCO’s decade of research. Grant funds will provide operational support for these core functions for two years.

This grant funds efforts by Robert Downs of the University of Arizona and Robert Hazen, cofounder of the Deep Carbon Observatory, to undertake a systematic application of evolutionary theories to carbon minerals. Downs and Hazen have argued persuasively that the lens of evolution fruitfully explains key aspects of diversification of mineral species, mineralization rates, and structural complexity through Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. Two-thirds of Earth’s mineral species are biologically mediated, inextricably linking the geosphere and biosphere in co-evolution. Grant funds support two interconnected activities. First, Downs and Hazen will develop and exploit data resources, statistical modeling, and visualization tools to understand quantitatively Earth’s changing carbon mineralogy from crust to mantle. Second, they will expand and explore the Deep-Time Data Infrastructure, which combines mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, and proteomics resources. Planned outputs include an open-access carbon mineral data base with more than 10,000 data sets for carbon-bearing minerals that include age, locality, and depth.

Funds from this grant support MoBE 2017, a two-day Microbiology of the Built Environment Research and Applications Symposium to be held October 11–12, 2017 at the U.S. National Academies in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the symposium is to engage and inform potential funders and community stakeholders by highlighting research findings, identifying intersections with stakeholder missions, and showcasing a National Academies consensus study, Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application, which documents the state of knowledge on the microbiome/built environment interface, identifies knowledge gaps, and sets out a list of prioritized areas for future research. Each day of the symposium will include one keynote speaker and four themed sessions. Topics to be discussed include the nexus of microbial exposure and building design, public health and indoor microbial communities, manipulating microbiome composition through architectural choices and material selection, and potential applications of indoor microbial research. A total of 160 guests are expected, including researchers, journalists, industry representatives, and policymakers from state, federal, and international government bodies. MoBE 2017 promises to be an important capstone event for the Foundation’s MoBE program as we near the end of planned grantmaking in 2017. If successful, it will engage and inform potential funders and community stakeholders from government agencies, philanthropic organizations, and companies, while celebrating the scientific achievements of the program.

There are nearly 600,000 portable classrooms across the country. These “temporary” structures are plagued with problems: poor ventilation, water intrusion, high levels of formaldehyde, and insufficient building maintenance. The problems are particularly worrisome given that recent studies have shown that poor indoor air quality can reduce cognitive performance. This grant funds a team led by Professor Kerry Kinney at the University of Texas, Austin, to construct a case study examining how “hidden spaces” in a temporary-yet-permanent building influence the indoor microbiome. Hidden spaces like ceiling plenums and crawl spaces can be important vectors for the spread of microbes indoors. Dark, moist, and infrequently cleaned, such spaces often contain high levels of contaminants, which may subsequently be spread throughout the building by drafts. Studying actual portable classrooms, Kinney and her team plan to identify where microbes and other contaminants come from and where they go within classroom and hidden spaces, and then determine how positive and negative pressurization from ventilation systems affects the microbiota and other contaminants in various parts of the portable classroom The researchers will share their findings by publishing in building science, life science, and trade journals; in web posts; and by using social media to direct readers to these postings. The team will also make presentations at national and international meetings. Both a graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow will be trained in indoor microbiome and building science studies during the research.

Urban transportation systems have been studied as vectors for the transmission of infectious disease, but their role in moving harmless microbes among hosts is largely unknown. This grant funds a project by Curtis Huttenhower, associate professor of computational biology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate member of the Broad Institute, to determine the metabolic activity of host- and environmentally derived microbes in the public transportation microbiome and reconstruct associated biochemical pathways. Huttenhower’s study will determine the degree to which transit-associated microbial communities are functionally active as well as the basic microbial biochemical processes by which they persist in situ and (re-) transmit to and from human hosts. The team plans to share functional data and metadata through open access repositories. Manuscripts will be made open access whenever possible, and all software will be made freely available open source commensurate with the lab's existing work. The team expects to publish at least two papers and present the work at two conferences.

Administered by the Council for Economic Education (CEE), the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards recognize excellent high school economics teachers from the New York metropolitan area. The candidates are selected annually based on their effectiveness, creativity, and ability to motivate underserved students. Three winning teachers receive a cash award of $5,000, and their schools each receive $2,500 to support economics education. Honorees are recognized at the CEE’s Visionary Awards dinner, which is attended by academic and practicing economists as well as business and civic leaders. Funds from this grant support administration of the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards for two years. Additional funds support a series of activities by CEE aimed at strengthening economic education in the New York metropolitan area, including six professional development workshops for economics teachers, a three-day teacher boot camp, a pilot program to test innovative economics curricula, and outreach efforts to increase participation.