This grant to Richard Newell at the Duke University Energy Initiative supports the second phase of research focused on documenting and understanding local economic responses to managing shale gas and oil revenues.  Newell’s previous research analyzed the extent to which increased tax receipts are able to cover growing expenditures for municipal services in several municipalities and counties across eight states. This grant will allow Newell to expand his efforts in the states already surveyed and to expand his research to eight additional states, covering every major shale energy producing region in the country. Newell and his team will conduct over 75 on-the-ground structured interviews with local municipal managers, industry stakeholders, and other experts in these states.  They will also collect financial data from local governments and produce a robust economic analysis comparing tax collection and revenue distribution practices.  The expansion of state coverage will also allow the research team to write a set of synthesis reports that compare experiences across the United States.  Finally, Newell and his team also propose to disseminate their research findings broadly in academic and policy settings.

Building a vibrant, multidisciplinary community of researchers working on the microbiology of the built environment requires bringing together a wide range of life scientists (microbiologists, ecologists, mycologists, bioinformaticians, etc.) and building scientists (engineers, architects, aerosol scientists, indoor air quality specialists, etc.)  Funds from this grant support the administrative and organizational costs for two annual meetings of the microbiology of the built environment research community, to be held in 2015 and 2016.  In addition to paper presentations, panels, and plenaries, the conferences will include significant outreach activities targeting younger researchers in an attempt to engage the next generation of researchers in microbial ecology.  Additional grant funds will support a feasibility study to examine ways to make the conference self-sustaining going forward.

Nearly one in five Americans spends time in school buildings each school day.  Despite troubling findings that poor indoor air quality can reduce cognitive performance in students, schools are often not well maintained. There are nearly 600,000 portable classrooms, also known as trailers, across the country and, unfortunately, these spaces are plagued with poor ventilation, water intrusion, and high levels of formaldehyde. Funds from this grant support a project by Professor of Engineering Kerry Kinney and colleagues Richard Corsi, Atila Novoselac, and Ying Xu at the University of Texas at Austin to determine how the microbiome and air quality inside portable classroom buildings are affected by ventilation conditions and building design. The proposed project will examine the relationship between the microorganisms and pollutants found inside the actual classroom spaces to those found in the “hidden spaces” (e.g., wall cavities, crawl spaces) within portable classroom buildings, aiming to identify where microbes and other contaminants come from and where they go within the actual classroom and hidden spaces.  The research team will also investigate how positive and negative pressurization from the ventilation systems affects the microbiota and other contaminants in various parts of the portable classroom.

This grant provides partial support for a consensus study and subsequent report by the National Academy of Sciences on the microbiology of the built environment. An ad hoc committee of approximately 12 to 14 experts representing various disciplinary and sectoral perspectives will oversee this 20?month project that will include staff from the National Research Council (NRC), the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  The consensus study will begin with a fact?finding workshop that will bring together key stakeholder communities. The committee will use the information from the workshop as well as from the published literature and other sources to develop their report. They will meet four or five times to gather information and to deliberate about the knowledge gaps identified and the development of a prioritized research plan to address these gaps. The result of the study will be a consensus report that 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 to address these gaps. The report will be available at no cost as a PDF file on the National Academies’ website. The National Academies plan to disseminate the report’s findings through briefings to the public, sponsors, and professional societies as well as through commentaries, op?ed pieces, and podcasts.

Funds from this grant provide partial support for a study examining Native American students’ exposure to environmental asthma triggers at home and at school and will examine whether cleaning and ventilation interventions will result in fewer asthma symptoms and a decrease in school absences for the students.  Sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the study will conduct microbial sampling of homes and schools in the Cherokee Nation in pursuit of three primary objectives: Determine the impact of building ventilation on the airborne and surface concentrations and community structure of bacteria and fungi; Estimate the impact of cleaning on the microbial profiles present in floor dust samples; Study associations between in?depth microbial measurements based on DNA and the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) measurements, for assessing the effectiveness of surface cleaning. ATP measurements are the “gold standard” for evaluating cleaning in schools, health care settings, and food production facilities. Sloan funds will enable project leader Richard J. Shaughnessy of the University of Tulsa to augment his efforts by adding building science measurements and modern microbial measurements to the research protocols.   The study proposes to develop new findings about the impact of ventilation and cleaning on the microbial profiles found in indoor air, surfaces, and floors. The team will share their results through peer?reviewed journal publications, presentations at national and international conferences, and publications in trade journals aimed at the cleaning and ventilation industries.

Funds from this grant provide continued support to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in its efforts to lead a network of top economists in the examination of issues related to aging and work and to the barriers to working longer. Led by economist David Wise, this network of scholars has substantial past and ongoing research expertise on health and health trends at older ages, population aging and its implications, the determinants of work and retirement, the incentives in public and employer policies, and the psychosocial factors that influence behavior. Grant funds will help NBER extend the network collaboration by producing at least nine papers focused on how to facilitate work at older ages. Additional topic areas to be addressed include work capacity at older ages; how public and employer benefit policies affect work and retirement; and factors that facilitate work by seniors, such as work environments and job flexibility.

Drinking water regulations focus on the water coming out of the water treatment plant, not on the water that comes out of the taps in your home or office. Building (i.e., in-premise) plumbing systems deliver potable water to the tap, shower, and other fixtures. These plumbing systems are a critical component of the built environment because they represent front line human exposure to waterborne microbes, whether harmless or harmful, which can occur via aerosol inhalation, aspiration, skin contact, or ingestion.  Funds from this grant support a series of studies by Amy Pruden and Marc Edwards to develop new knowledge about how design, operational parameters, and engineering interventions shape the premise plumbing microbiome in conventional and green buildings. Pruden and Edwards have four objectives: Evaluate the role of water stagnation time in shaping the premise plumbing microbiome and propensity for opportunistic premise plumbing pathogens to colonize; Characterize the resilience of the microbiome to heat shock or heat interruption and quantify the response of opportunistic premise plumbing pathogens (OPPPs); Resolve the effect of copper and chloramine disinfectants; and Identify key microbial ecological relationships among OPPPs and the broader premise plumbing microbiome, when subject to a range of engineering design and control measures.  Pruden and Edwards plan to share their findings through peer-reviewed papers and presentations at national and international conferences, as well as through a webinar for building and water professionals. Additional grant funds support training for at least three graduate students.

Matthew Shapiro and a research team at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley have successfully completed an innovative, two-year data infrastructure pilot that lays the groundwork for providing invaluable data regarding the real-time financial activities of older Americans as they work, transition into, and complete retirement. The Michigan/Berkeley team relied on data from a mobile payments application, Check (previously known as Pageonce) that integrates individuals’ bank accounts, credit cards, and asset accounts. With this data, the research team developed a data infrastructure that can be used to study individual income paths, consumption patterns, wealth levels, and financial portfolio choices of Americans, with a specific focus in this study on older Americans, more than 40,000 of which are Check users.  Funds from this grant provide continued support for the project, allowing the team to move from pilot to production of the data infrastructure and maintain a panel dataset of the work, income, spending, and balance sheet of a population of approximately one million users.  Subsequent analyses will allow the research team to examine behavior of older Americans as they face labor market transitions, health shocks, and the take up of Social Security; produce time series estimates of income and spending for novel aggregates including, for example, spending and income by age and type; and study the quality of financial decisions among older populations and of behavioral reactions to discrete financial events like income tax refunds. The team has instituted numerous safeguards to ensure the confidentiality and privacy of individual consumer data are strictly protected.

While it is well known that moisture in buildings is bad for both the structure and the occupants, no one has systematically investigated building material wetness and the associated response of fungal and bacterial communities. This grant supports efforts by Jeffrey Siegel, associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto, in collaboration with J. Gregory Caporaso, assistant professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University, to determine the impact of moisture on fungal growth on common indoor surfaces. Sampling microbial community composition on gypsum drywall on three different test scales, Siegel and Caporaso will address how moisture affects microbial growth on common building materials, how different sensors respond to moisture changes in common building materials, which moisture measurements best correlate with changes in microbial communities under various conditions, and which building/materials/moisture factors have the biggest impact on fungal growth and community makeup? The researchers will share their findings through publications in building and life science journals, trade journals, and blog posts and through presentations at national and international meetings.

Recent Sloan-funded work by economist John Shoven of Stanford University demonstrates that, under a wide range of circumstances, healthy Americans would benefit from delaying the age at which they begin taking Social Security benefits.  This grant funds a wide-ranging education campaign by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) to effectively communicate Shoven’s research to the public. Building on its successful, user-friendly toolkit of materials, “Social Security: It Pays to Wait,” NASI will engage in an ambitious campaign to disseminate the toolkit through a multipronged media strategy that will utilize a grassroots outreach campaign composed of a number of well-connected partner organizations, including the Center for Rural Strategies, the National Women’s Law Center, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Urban League.  Grant funds will be used for dissemination, for efforts to deepen NASI’s connections with organizations well positioned to reach older workers, and for improvements to the toolkit based on user feedback.