High-quality, easily searchable data on the transmission, distribution, and use of electricity are hard to come by. Existing data sources usually fall short in a number of ways. Many data sets report electricity usage statistics only at monthly or yearly intervals, making it impossible to measure how demand varies from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, or minute-to-minute. Usage data are often aggregated at the household level, not broken down by individual appliance, making it difficult to study consumer behavior. Often, data are only available in hard-to-use formats that are not amendable to manipulation, combination, or visualization. Pecan Street has created a data analytics tool, called Dataport, to provide timely, disaggregated electricity usage information to researchers. Data are collected from more than 1,000 homes outfitted with appliance-level sensors that report energy usage at fine-grained intervals. These data are also presented in a way that can be easily queried and visualized. Funds from this grant support three initiatives aimed at strengthening Dataport and increasing its usefulness to researchers. First, the Dataport team will implement several technical improvements to the platform, including better visualization tools, an improved user interface, and a new capacity that allows researchers to draw information from multiple data sources simultaneously. Second, Pecan Street will expand and diversify available data through importing and integrating electricity usage and pricing data from several government, utility, and regional transmission sources. Third, Pecan Street will extend its academic outreach and education activities to expand use of the platform, including on-campus training sessions, a research conference, and a paper competition for papers using Dataport data.

Fuel cells, which use chemistry rather than combustion to generate electricity, have a wide range of potential applications, from large arrays that can be integrated into the electricity grid to small cells that can power vehicles. Experts in the field, however, remain uncertain about a number of important issues, including how efficient fuel cells will become, how much costs will drop, and to what degree hypothesized benefits will be achieved when fuel cells leave the lab and enter the real world. This grant supports an emerging cohort of scholars at Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Institute for Energy Innovation plan to clarify these uncertainties. A team led by Jay Whitacre will conduct an expansive literature review and background assessment, laying out the current state of development of various fuel cell technologies, their advantages, their drawbacks, and what is and is not known about each. The team will then undertake an in-depth expert elicitation process that utilizes surveys, in-person interviews, and group discussions to identify consensus and critical uncertainties associated with the different fuel cell technologies being studied. The iterative expert elicitation process will provide a method for aggregating this diverse array of expert perspectives and will result in a series of high-profile, peer-reviewed journal articles that will cover topics related both to stationary fuel cell applications and the use of fuel cells in transportation. The effort promises to clarify the current state of fuel cell research, identify gaps in our knowledge, and expose promising ways forward.

This grant supports a series of research projects coordinated by researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research examining the distributional and efficiency tradeoffs and implications of U.S. energy policy. Sixteen researchers will carry out eight different studies that will look at a variety of interrelated issues, including whether the energy reductions achieved by current policies could be obtained at lower cost, how the costs of current energy policies are distributed across and within different income groups, and whether and to what extent these burdens could be upset by additional tax and transfer policies. Policies to be examined include vehicle and appliance efficiency standards, renewal energy subsidies, electric and hybrid automobile purchasing subsidies, and green building codes. The resulting research papers will be published in a special peer-reviewed issue of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.   Though the papers concern U.S. energy policies and will have obvious relevance to environmentalists and policymakers, the focus of each will be strictly empirical. No policy recommendations will be made.

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.