Grants Database

The Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships), totaling roughly $80 million dollars in annual commitments in support of research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. This database contains grants for currently operating programs going back to 2008. For grants from prior years and for now-completed programs, see the annual reports section of this website.

Grants Database

Grantee
Amount
City
Year
  • grantee: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    amount: $724,500
    city: Cambridge, MA
    year: 2015

    To support predoctoral research and training fellowships in energy economics

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Energy and Environment
    • Investigator Meredith Fowlie

    This grant funds the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) for the implementation of a predoctoral dissertation research fellowship program in energy economics. Fellowship support will provide young scholars currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in economics the opportunity to deepen their study of issues related to the economics of energy, including energy market design, innovation and productivity in the energy sector, the economics of the fracking boom, electricity transmission and distribution, infrastructure investment, the effects of environmental and other regulation on energy supply and demand, energy efficiency, and the economics of renewable energy.  Fellowships will be for a one-year period with an optional second year of funding contingent on satisfactory progress. Approximately seven fellows are expected to be supported over the grant period. Grant funds will be utilized for student stipends, defraying tuition costs, and permitting travel to professional workshops and conferences.

    To support predoctoral research and training fellowships in energy economics

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  • grantee: Resources for the Future, Inc.
    amount: $464,800
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2015

    To train the next generation of researchers and practitioners in energy and environmental economics and policy by launching a postdoctoral researcher program

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Energy and Environment
    • Investigator Margaret Walls

    Funds from this grant support postdoctoral researchers studying energy, natural resource, and environmental economics at the Washington D.C.–based nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future (RFF). The RFF program has several important strengths. First, supported postdoctoral researchers will split their time between defined projects and independent research, allowing them the opportunity to build the strong list of publications that is vital to securing a longer-term university position. Second, postdoctoral researchers will have the opportunity to build and expand their professional networks in policy, academic, and private sector circles, providing them with a broader range of subsequent career opportunities. Third, researchers will be trained in valuable skills like grant writing, public speaking, presenting material to policy audiences, and event organization, all of which will be critical for their advancement in their careers. Fourth, RFF will draw on a deep roster of senior in-house scholars and its extended network of affiliated university faculty to provide job placement services and career guidance. Fifth, there are no other federally or philanthropically funded energy and environmental economics postdoctoral researcher positions of this kind, making the RFF program unique in the field. Grant funds will provide fellowship and administrative support to the program for a period of three years.

    To train the next generation of researchers and practitioners in energy and environmental economics and policy by launching a postdoctoral researcher program

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  • grantee: Resources for the Future, Inc.
    amount: $608,905
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2015

    To understand the benefits and costs of shale gas and oil development on local communities

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Energy and Environment
    • Investigator Alan Krupnick

    Funds from this grant support three projects by Resources for the Future (RFF) that aim to improve our understanding of the broad array of local community impacts, both positive and negative, brought on by the extraction of shale gas and oil. In its first project, RFF will develop a comprehensive risk/benefit matrix and community impact framework that will bring together, in one place, a description and assessment of the various impacts that communities may face due to local shale gas extraction, covering everything from increased demands on local water infrastructure to increased traffic and noise. The second project will explore the legal and economic dimensions of private land leasing agreements, exploring the diversity of these agreements and how their differences result in differing consequences for municipalities and their residents. The third project consists of a qualitative exploration of the development of industry-community voluntary practices, protocols, and behaviors that constitute what is often termed the “social license to operate” in different localities. The effort will catalog how individual communities have worked with oil and gas companies to manage the inevitable disruptions caused by local oil and gas extraction. Taken together, the three projects will create a framework that will capture the diversity of local responses to the influx of shale gas developers, provide useful new directions for future scholarship, and give municipalities new resources for how to manage their own local shale gas and oil development.

    To understand the benefits and costs of shale gas and oil development on local communities

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  • grantee: Columbia University
    amount: $20,000
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2015

    To support a meeting on best practices for data publication in the Earth and space sciences

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Kerstin Lehnert

    To support a meeting on best practices for data publication in the Earth and space sciences

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  • grantee: George Mason University
    amount: $736,042
    city: Fairfax, VA
    year: 2015

    To support outreach for and adoption of PressForward, a software platform for the editorial curation of online scholarly research products

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Sean Takats

    Funds from this grant support the continued development and expansion of PressForward, a new software platform that aims to speed the dissemination of scholarship by allowing researchers to quickly and easily aggregate online articles, white papers, reports, and blog posts into online digital journals. Built atop the powerful and popular WordPress platform, PressForward enables researchers to impose structure on the diverse variety of scholarly materials proliferating on the web, pulling related materials together that are currently scattered across different preprint servers, personal blogs, and institutional archives.   Over the next three years, grant funds will help the PressForward team, headquartered at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, continue the development of the platform. Planned activities include working with institutional partners to launch 12 new digital projects powered by the platform, outreach to build and strengthen the growing PressForward user base, and development of plans for long-term fiscal sustainability.

    To support outreach for and adoption of PressForward, a software platform for the editorial curation of online scholarly research products

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  • grantee: Association of Research Libraries
    amount: $600,000
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2015

    To support the scaling, data quality, and incorporation into university workflows of SHARE, a system for the tracking of research release events across publishers and repositories

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Elliott Shore

    This grant funds the continued development of SHARE, an open access database and service that links together university-based data repositories in an effort to make scholarly research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. Developed in collaboration between the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, SHARE includes not only a searchable database of research, but also a scholarly research notification service that allows users to keep abreast of new developments in scholarship, for example, when a relevant new white paper is uploaded by a scholar they are following, an important dataset is updated, or a previously unpublished study is published. Funds from this grant will support the continued development and expansion of the SHARE platform, including efforts to increase the number of participating data providers, integration of SHARE into the diverse workflows of member institutions, and the cleaning and normalizing of the, oft-messy, metadata that powers the SHARE search algorithms.

    To support the scaling, data quality, and incorporation into university workflows of SHARE, a system for the tracking of research release events across publishers and repositories

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  • grantee: American Association for the Advancement of Science
    amount: $772,955
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2015

    To promote the professionalization and institutionalization of the role of the community engagement manager in scientific societies and large-scale research collaborations

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Joshua Freeman

    Community engagement managers are increasingly seen as vital and irreplaceable elements for the smooth functioning of healthy online communities. Though it is a new field, community engagement has matured quickly, with a growing body of common methods and best practices. Individuals playing this role in scientific contexts, however, are often isolated from this community of practice, and left to trial and error to figure out how to be most effective. This grant supports a Community Engagement Fellowship program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for a network of community engagement managers that will connect several scientific fields. The Fellows will be based in a combination of AAAS-affiliated scholarly societies and large multidisciplinary collaborations, which will build capacity in scientific organizations. In addition, fellows will be brought together for annual training boot camps and monthly professional development webinars, allowing them to share ideas, common challenges, and best practices. Grant funds support approximately half of the planned 18 fellows of the initial cohort, with additional funds provided to offset the costs of outreach, fellow selection, and program administration.

    To promote the professionalization and institutionalization of the role of the community engagement manager in scientific societies and large-scale research collaborations

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  • grantee: Yale University
    amount: $256,641
    city: New Haven, CT
    year: 2015

    To conduct a pilot study to determine how microbial and chemical emissions from commercial air conditioners impact the microbiome of occupied spaces

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Microbiology of the Built Environment
    • Investigator Jordan Peccia

    Air conditioning (AC) systems cool and dehumidify air. The process deposits moisture on the cooling coils, creating an environment conducive to microbial growth. We know very little, however, about the microbes that grow on AC units or how these microbes affect and interact with the microbial populations of the buildings they cool. This grant supports Jordan Peccia, associate professor of environmental engineering at Yale, who will lead a multidisciplinary team in a pilot study examining how the microbial and chemical emissions of commercial air conditioning units impact the microbiome of occupied spaces. Over two years, Peccia and his team will characterize the bacterial and fungal communities present on the cooling coil surfaces of commercial air conditioners, estimate the microbial volatile organic compound (MVOC) emission rates from commercial AC units, and quantify the influence that AC emissions have on the indoor air and surface microbiome of occupied spaces. The team will initially sample 40 different commercial air conditioning units and use these samples to examine how microbial population structure is affected by a host of environmental variables, including outdoor climate, coil moisture, and coil temperature. They will then measure AC microbial emission rates and the characteristics of emitted microbes to study how these correlate with the surface and air microbiome composition in the buildings these units cool.

    To conduct a pilot study to determine how microbial and chemical emissions from commercial air conditioners impact the microbiome of occupied spaces

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  • grantee: Boston University
    amount: $704,982
    city: Boston, MA
    year: 2015

    To measure the work disincentives facing older Americans arising from America’s major fiscal programs and provisions

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Working Longer
    • Investigator Laurence Kotlikoff

    This grant funds a study by Lawrence Kotlikoff of Boston University and Alan Auerbach of the University of California, Berkeley that will measure the work disincentives facing older Americans arising from our country’s almost 40 major fiscal programs and provisions. Kotlikoff and Auerbach will study the combined effects of all these programs to understand the marginal tax rate on income earned by older workers at different ages and to assess their combined potential to limit the work and incomes of the elderly. Using detailed data from several public datasets and advanced financial analysis software, the research team will test several hypotheses, including whether there are high median net marginal tax rates on the labor supply of the elderly at all levels of remaining lifetime resources; whether there exists a large dispersion in net marginal tax rates even holding remaining resources fixed, whether there are significant increases in sustainable living standards associated with the elderly working longer, and whether major impacts of the fiscal system on the elderly’s labor supply can be reduced with revenue-neutral fiscal reforms that preserve fiscal progressivity.

    To measure the work disincentives facing older Americans arising from America’s major fiscal programs and provisions

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  • grantee: University of Aberdeen Foundation, Inc.
    amount: $335,000
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2015

    To improve representation of the built environment fungi in the UNITE, an open access database for molecular identification of fungi

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Microbiology of the Built Environment
    • Investigator Andrew Taylor

    This grant supports an initiative by Andy Taylor at the University of Aberdeen, in collaboration with Urmas Kхljalg at the University of Tartu in Estonia, that aims to significantly expand the UNITE database, a key resource used by mycologists in the genomic identification of fungi. The UNITE database contains genetic sequences of known fungi, which allows researchers to identify unknown fungi collected at field sites by matching the genetic sequences of collected samples to the master samples in the database. Unfortunately, the UNITE database lacks reliable standard sequence data on many of the fungi commonly found in indoor and built environments, which deprives researchers working on the microbiology of the built environment of a powerful tool for taxonomic identification. Over the next two years, Taylor and Kхljalg will target and sequence previously unsequenced fungal strains relevant to human and built environments, hold two sequence annotation workshops that aim to improve the quality of available sequence data, and develop metadata standards and protocols that will enable better inter-database comparison of collected fungal data.

    To improve representation of the built environment fungi in the UNITE, an open access database for molecular identification of fungi

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