This grant provides partial support for production of a six-part history of the African continent to be hosted by the prominent academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher Professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research. Foundation funds will support segments devoted to documenting the scientific, technological, and engineering achievements of various African civilizations, including such events as the founding of the world's oldest university at Al-Karouine in Morocco in 859 AD; the advanced mathematics developed in Fes, Marakesh, and Timbuktu between the 12th and 17th centuries; and Abu Raihan al-Biruni's precise calculation of Earth's radius. The proposed documentary series not only contains interesting information about the historical development of science and technology, but also challenges widespread stereotypes of Africa as backward and undeveloped and the widespread misunderstanding of the pivotal role African civilizations have played in humanity’s scientific and cultural advance.

NumFOCUS (the NumPy Foundation for Open Code for Usable Science) is a nonprofit founded to handle funds and act as a fiscal sponsor for many essential projects in the open source data science software stack, including several Sloan grantees. Projects choose to affiliate with NumFOCUS for mostly logistical reasons: lower overhead costs than universities; less-bureaucratic finance operations; and greater flexibility for operating across countries and organizations (e.g., hiring a research assistant at a third-party organization). The collection of so many open source projects under one umbrella, however, promises the opportunity to rapidly circulate best practices among member projects. One of the biggest issues shared across the NumFOCUS portfolio is project sustainability. Fund from this grant will help NumFOCUS build capacity in the areas of business planning and industry outreach to serve its portfolio of projects. Funding includes two years of support for a projects director, for efforts to build relationships with industry sponsors, for an annual workshop on business models and sustainability strategies for member projects, and to provide business plan and sustainability mentoring for projects that request it.

This grant funds research by Professor William Nazaroff, an expert on the physics and chemistry of indoor air pollutants, and Professor Allen Goldstein, an expert on anthropogenic and natural contributions to the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The researchers are working to expand the understanding of processes controlling abundance, sources, and fates of organic chemicals indoors, focusing on the roles of human occupants as agents influencing indoor air chemistry. Over a several-week period, the researchers will monitor the indoor air of a residence under five conditions: (a) house vacant, emphasis on spatial resolution; (b) house vacant, emphasis on temporal resolution; (c) house normally occupied, emphasis on spatial resolution; (d) house normally occupied, emphasis on temporal resolution; and (e) manipulation experiments, such as cooking, cleaning, or dishwashing. Monitoring will focus on detecting several important chemicals, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrate radicals, nitrogen oxide trace gases, carbon dioxide, and ozone. In addition, the team will sample environmental conditions such as temperature, relative humidity, ultrafine particulate concentration, and air exchange rates. Samples will then be analyzed to try to apportion VOC chemical concentrations in sampled indoor air to their sources, including outdoor air, building-associated sources present when the residence is vacant, occupant-associated sources, and secondary production from indoor chemical reactions. This project will generate important new insights into indoor chemistry, which will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences and meetings. At least three students will be trained during the course of the project.

This grant funds a three-year collaboration between Jonathan Abbatt, professor of chemistry, and Jeffrey Siegel, associate professor of civil and mineral engineering, to expand our understanding of multiphase chemistry in indoor environments. The overall goal of their grant-supported work is to better understand the nature of the reactive processes that affect the composition of material deposited on indoor surfaces and to examine the associated impacts on the state of the indoor environment. Abbatt and Siegel have chosen three common sources of materials that deposit on surfaces indoors: skin oil materials from people; particles generated by combustion processes such as cooking or cigarette smoking; and common chlorine- and nitrogen-containing cleaning agents such as household bleach. They will expose these chemicals to indoor air under both laboratory and real-world conditions and observe how such exposure leads to particulate deposits and the creation of new compounds. Abbatt and his team will use a comprehensive range of state-of-the-art mass spectrometer instrumentation to conduct the chemical analyses. Most of these instruments have been rarely, if ever, used indoors and the team expects to develop new analytical methods for their deployment indoors. The team will share their findings through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences and meetings. At least one postdoctoral fellow and three students will be trained during the project.

The state of deep carbon modeling today resembles that of climate modeling 40 years ago, when models of the atmosphere, oceans, sea ice and glaciers, forests, and land surface were all partially developed but were not integrated. In today’s geoscience, models exist of the workings of the Earth’s core, the lower and upper mantle, the crust, and of particular processes such as volcanism and plate tectonics, but no system or framework embraces all of these, especially across time scales ranging from thousands to hundreds of millions of years. Funds from this grant support efforts to integrate two popular models: MELTS, Mark Ghiorso’s model of the thermodynamic properties of magmas, and DEW, a model developed by Dmietri Sverjensky that simulates the behavior of water and water-dissolved carbon in the deep Earth. Funds will support the development of an integrated model that will be open source, freely available, released to the scientific community, and suitable for integration into the larger Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) system of models. Also funded is a workshop that will introduce the new model to the DCO community. Development of comprehensive numerical simulations of the origins, movements, and forms of deep carbon has emerged over the past three years as a major, integrative goal of the Deep Carbon Observatory. The proposed integration of melts and fluid models, if successful, represents significant progress toward to achieving that goal.

This grant supports the continued operation of the Secretariat of the Deep Carbon Observatory DCO). The Secretariat performs a series of invaluable coordinating and steering functions for the Deep Carbon Observatory as a whole, including conducting program management and oversight; organizing the DCO International Science Meeting and other scientific meetings; coordinating all components of the DCO to amplify its impact;  assisting with research synthesis, integration, and long?term planning; expanding and strengthening the DCO partnerships and intra-community interactions; promoting program development and leveraging of DCO resources;  facilitating further development of DCO-supported instruments and promoting their broad community use; engaging early-career scientists in the DCO; and reducing enterprise risks. Grant funds will support these and other activities of the secretariat as the DCO moves toward completion in 2019.