Hypothes.is is a web-based annotation platform that enables users to annotate online documents and share their annotations with others. Supported by the Sloan Foundation from conception through prototyping, the platform now has 10,000 regular users and is seeing increasing use among lawyers, journalists, and academic researchers. Interest from the academic publishing community has been particularly noteworthy, as several publishers have developed their own, expensive, internal annotation systems as part of their publication review and editing process. This grant supports efforts by Hypothes.is to move the platform away from philanthropic support and toward independent financial sustainability. Grant funds support the hiring of a head of business development, software modifications that will allow the platform to function on a software-as-a-service model; and the creation of administrative interfaces for client publishers.

Drinking water regulations focus on the quality of the water coming out of the water treatment plant, but water can pick up bacteria and other microbes as it travels from the plant to the faucet.  Since 2012, the Foundation has supported researchers at Virginia Tech to characterize the plumbing microbiome and how it affects the microbial profile of household water. This two-year grant continues Foundation support for this work.  Professors Amy Pruden and Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech have designed a series of experiments to explore how warm (30°C) ambient water temperatures and use of recycled water influence the building plumbing microbiome. Over the next two years, they will use complementary batch and continuous flow experiments to study how water temperature affects abundance and diversity among bacteria and amoebae in household water and whether recycled water’s distinct chemistry (relative to potable water) causes greater proliferation of bacteria and free-living amoebae in bulk water and biofilms. The Virginia Tech team will share their findings through peer-reviewed papers and presentations at national and international conferences and through blog posts and other social media. The sequence data will be deposited in public databases. At least one student and two postdoctoral fellows will be trained under the grant.

With Foundation support, a team led by Jillian Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley has been investigating how preterm infants, taken from their mothers at birth and placed in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), nonetheless acquire the microbes that will become their human microbiome. Initial findings suggest microbes from the “sterile” NICU itself colonize the infants. This grant supports the continuation of Banfield’s work for an additional three years. Banfield hypothesizes that certain forms of microbial life can survive in NICU environments for months or years, travel from room to room by riding on nurses’ clothing, and eventually become incorporated into infant gut, oral, or skin microbiomes. To test these hypotheses, Banfield and her team will track three rooms and their occupants in the NICU of the Magee-Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA over two years. Using advanced metagenomic techniques, the team will identify persistent, room‐adapted strains of microbes living in the NICU, identify which of these strains successfully colonize infant patients, and quantify the transfer of microbes via bioaerosols and travel vectors such as nurses’ uniforms. The team will share their findings through journal publications, presentations at national and international conferences, and through blogs on microBE.net.

This grant supports the research of Peter Berg at Michigan State University, who is examining how changes in pensionable ages implemented through public pension reform in Germany affected the managerial strategies businesses adopted in response to longer work lives. The work is the first microeconomic examination of the effects of increases in social security age on establishments’ internal labor markets. Berg and his team will use linked employer-employee data (LIAB) provided by the Research Data Center (FDZ) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Germany. This LIAB will then be combined with administrative establishment data from the Establishment History Panel (BHP) to construct the projected policy impact variable. These unique data will allow Berg to examine of how changes in pensionable age differentially affect business establishments; how they affect hiring, promotion, and compensation decisions; and whether they are linked to store or factory closure. The team will also catalogue and assess the diversity of establishment responses to increases in the pensionable age.

This grant provides three years of support to the American Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) to maintain and develop its Sloan Science and Film website, the most up-to-date and comprehensive resource for information about film projects supported through the Foundation’s Film program. Funds will support a site redesign that will streamline the user interface and upgrade accessibility on mobile phones, the development of a new content management system, the creation of a Sloan Film Channel, and the hiring of a full-time managing editor who will be responsible for a host of activities, including producing audio and visual content; writing and posting articles; organizing public Science and Film events; commissioning critics and scientists to contribute to the site; liaising with Sloan film partners and with filmmakers and scientists; and promoting site content on social media.

This grant continues support for a program at Columbia University that aims to encourage the next generation of filmmakers to write screenplays and produce short films about science and technology. Supported activities include two annual $10,000 awards given to the best student screenplay with a scientific or technological theme; two $20,000 production awards to help produce a science-themed film project; a student mentoring program and an annual information session and panel discussion introducing students to  the program offerings and to working scientists; and off-campus learning activities that expose student filmmakers to the process of scientific inquiry and cutting-edge developments in modern science. Grant funds provide support for these and related activities for three years.

This grant supports a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Science Festival Alliance (SFA) to allow the SFA—a network and incubator of community-based science festivals across the country—to add nine more science festivals in communities with small resource bases. Over the next two years, the collaboration will select and recruit nine community science festivals for inclusion in the network, providing nine challenge grants that facilitate expansion and development. Science festival members would then be ready to mentor future new science festivals. The project promises to accelerate the geographical spread of the science festival movement and promote science festivals as an effective instrument to advance public understanding of science.

In 2013, the Foundation made grants to Cornel University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and The Pennsylvania State University for the establishment and operation of three University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEMs). Part of the Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. program, UCEMs are coordinated, campus-wide initiatives aimed at promoting the success of STEM graduate students from traditionally underrepresented groups. UCEMs provide minority graduate students with a host of different benefits, including $40,000 in direct fellowship support for selected students, peer and faculty mentoring, seminars on various aspects of graduate life, a variety of professional development activities, and programs aimed at recruiting and retaining talented minority graduate students. Funds from this grant provide three years of continued operational support for the UCEMs at Cornell, Georgia Tech, and Penn State. Grant funds are administered and dispersed by the Foundation’s agent, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME). Additional funds from this grant will be used by NACME for evaluation and analysis of UCEM progress and to facilitate travel and information-gathering.

Since the Sloan Minority Ph.D. (MPHD) program began in 1995, more than 900 minority graduate students supported by the Foundation have received their Ph.D. in a STEM field. Some 450 more students are still making progress toward their degree. Funds from this grant to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) support the establishment of a professional development network for alumni of the Sloan Minority Ph.D. program, with a particular emphasis on those alumni who have or will continue their scholarly work in positions as college or university faculty. Over the next three years, the SSRC will spearhead the creation of the Sloan Scholar Mentor Network, and will conduct a variety of activities to grow and strengthen the network and to ensure it delivers value to its members. These include studying alumni to understand their evolving needs as researchers and faculty members, and as underrepresented minorities in STEM; building a robust and active mentoring network; working to build a common identity among alumni; offering leadership training and support to help Sloan alumni become established as leaders in their fields and workplaces, and to prepare them to become change agents within their home institutions; and establishing evaluation procedures that will enable the network to increasingly deliver value to its members. Planned activities involve “meet and greet” events at universities and disciplinary meetings, a biennial conference for alumni, a recent Ph.D. retreat for postdoctoral fellows and early-career faculty, the creation of an up-to-date directory, and a series of professional development webinars.

Funds from this grant support the continued production of Making Sen$e with Paul Solman. Broadcast on the PBS NewsHour and supplemented by original content produced for the segment’s website, Making Sen$e is a series of short news segments that explain business and economic news clearly and engagingly to a general audience. Topics covered by Making Sen$e segments include the contingent workforce, welfare-to-work programs, the minimum wage, the carried interest tax loophole, the foreclosure crisis, the EB?5 visa program, and the economics of terrorism, online dating, and sports gambling. Grant funds support the production of 52 segments over the next year, as well as additional funds for improved graphics and the production of high-quality web-exclusive content.