The BioBus is a fully mobile research lab that visit schools and public science events in New York City. Outfitted with state-of-the-art microscopes and run by a diverse team of young scientists, the BioBus is a mobile science field trip where students can use a phase-contrast video microscope to make movies of crawling amoeba, use a scanning electron microscope to image a fly eye, or use a fluorescing microscope to see glowing, streaming plant chloroplast. In 2014, the BioBus visited 88 K-12 schools in New York City, bringing high-quality, engaging education to some 16,000 students, 57 percent of whom were African-American or Latino. Funds from this grant support the continued operation and expansion of BioBus. Over the next three years, Cell Motion Laboratories, the parent organization of the BioBus, will build another BioBus mobile lab and, in partnership with Columbia University, build a “BioBase” community lab in Harlem, which will allow students to continue their educational experiences once the BioBus has moved locations, and expand its educational offerings to underserved students in Harlem.

Science Goes to the Movies is a new public television program produced by the CUNY TV Foundation that reviews current movies and television shows from a scientific perspective. Topics discussed in early episodes include visualizing black holes, Birdman and the prevalence of hallucinations, and depictions of women scientists in the Big Bang Theory. Hosted by neuroscientist Heather Belin and journalist Faith Sailie, Science Goes to the Movies premiered in February 2015 and is reaching a growing audience through integrated use of broadcast, cable, web, and mobile platforms and has performed well in its native market of New York City. Funds from this grant provide production support for the show as it explores possible distribution to a national audience through PBS’s Executive Programming Service, bringing the series to half the PBS stations in the country with a net audience of more than a million viewers.

The basic process of moving large tabular data from one environment to another is fraught with issues. Ambiguous column headings and messy metadata can make it difficult and time consuming to understand exactly what a data file contains. As researchers move data from repository to research tool (and often through a series of research tools), the opportunities for error proliferate. Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation has developed a lightweight approach to structuring metadata about tabular datasets. With the Pollock approach, tabular datasets are packaged and moved with files that describe the data—datatypes, formatting, source, etc.—allowing research tools like Matlab, Excel, and Stata to appropriately parse the data inside. He describes this “data package” model as the equivalent to a shipping container for data, making it easier to standardize the entire logistics process. Funds from this grant continue development of the Pollock’s “data package” standard. Funded activities include the development of validators and extensions that would make it easy to export and import data packages from standard research tools (essentially adding new “Save As” and “Open” options); outreach to specific user communities to model use of the specification for individual disciplinary communities; the launch of several pilot projects integrating the data package model into existing user workflows; and building a broader development community around the need for better tools for efficient and trusted storage, transport, and analysis of large tabular data.

This grant provides partial funding for eight postdoctoral fellowships in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences. Though the fellowship program is administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), fellows are appointed at host institutions, where they work on digital initiatives that marshal a university’s technical, archival, and library resources in service to the data curation and management needs of the institution’s researchers.  Of the eight fellowships supported, four will focus on software curation, the growing archival field that seeks to preserve the software programs and platforms developed for and as a result of scientific research.  In addition to providing fellowship support, grant funds will expand the fellowship program to include improved education and training on software curation, both among the fellows and at participating host institutions.

There are currently no academic social science repositories that can routinely handle terabytes of data. This despite the fact that the rise of the Internet and new sensing technologies are creating large new datasets of potential interest to social scientists, like phone usage data or geospatial social media data. This grant supports efforts by Gary King at Harvard University to expand the popular Dataverse platform so that it becomes the first data archiving and management application capable of handling social science data at the terabyte scale. Fully open source, Dataverse is a decentralized web application that allows individual institutions to download and run their own instances. Universities and research labs can manage their data easily while at the same time configuring the system to meet their own needs and comply with their own institutional policies. Funds from this grant will fund the technical development of the Dataverse platform to accommodate the immense logistical and resource challenges posed by “big data” datasets, expanding the power of an increasingly important resource for social scientists everywhere.

Funds from this grant provide continued operating support to the New York Genome Center (NYGC) in its efforts to strengthen and diversify the bioinformatics community in New York City. Sloan funds will support the NYGC’s plans to develop new infrastructure, methods, and training that it expects will catalyze research insights, empower researchers with new bioinformatics capabilities, and continue to solidify New York City as a genomics and life sciences hub. Over the next three years, the NYGC will continue to develop its bioinformatics capabilities in support of its member institutions, develop a shared computing facility with access to public data sets and state-of-the-art data analysis pipelines, craft new algorithms and techniques in bioinformatics, and train biological and medical researchers in core bioinformatics skills through training courses and in-person and virtual educational sessions. Expected outputs include peer-reviewed publications, updated software packages, a bioinformatics commons and genomic data warehouse, and the training of 50 researchers per year.

This grant continues support of an initiative by the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) to commission, develop, and produce new science- and technology-themed plays. Over the next three years, MTC plans to commission 15 science-themed plays from both emerging and established playwrights, provide dramaturgical support to commissioned artists, hold in-house readings of all completed scripts, stage three public readings, and produce one science-themed play at the theater’s 47th Street mainstage. Plays are commissioned and scripts selected for production in consultation with an independent advisory board composed of distinguished working scientists. Commissioned playwrights receive between $10,000 and $20,000 for their work.

Funds from this grant continue support for Jesse H. Ausubel, Director of Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, in his role as the Sloan Foundation’s primary liaison to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO).  As Sloan’s representative at the DCO, Ausubel serves as a member of the DCO leadership, elicits grant proposals in support of the DCO’s four research communities, oversees progress and reporting on the Foundation’s approximately 30 active DCO grants, represents the Foundation’s policies, priorities, concerns, and aspirations to the DCO leadership, and prepares periodic reports to the Foundation on the DCO’s progress towards its decadal goals.  Grant funds provide primary salary and administrative support for Ausubel and his team’s activities through the anticipated completion of the DCO in 2019, where his work will focus on managing important late-stage DCO projects related to modeling and visualization, intellectual synthesis of DCO discoveries, dissemination of DCO results, and crafting stable institutional and intellectual legacies for the program after Foundation support ends in 2019.  

Though the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) was conceived as a 10-year effort, a midterm external review of the collaborative’s achievements suggested that the DCO leadership explore the possibilities for continuing the collaboration after Sloan Foundation funding lapses in 2019. This grant supports the creation of a special task force to explore such options. Led by French geologist Claud Jaupert, the task force will outline practical requirements and consequences of post?2019 options for the Deep Carbon Observatory, exploring the ways in which the DCO might be continued, expanded, or wound down. It will scan the intellectual horizon for new research ventures; outline international cooperative programs that could build on the DCO community and expand its scientific reach; identify researchers and academic institutions that might participate in post?2019 activities; and search for institutions, funding bodies, and foundations that could provide financial support for post?2019 activities. It would carry out these activities through commissioned papers, visits with key stakeholders and institutions, and a trio of workshops, including special focus on the (now) younger scientists who will be in the prime of their careers during the decade of the 2020s. The effort represents a reasoned, prudent way to evaluate what to do, if anything, with the databases, websites, instruments, models, monitoring networks, and human capital created by the DCO’s first decade of discovery.

Funds from this grant support an effort by Louise Kellogg of the University of California, Davis to lead a multidisciplinary group of Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) researchers in the development of the first stages of a Deep Carbon Earth Model that integrates existing geophysical knowledge with insights uncovered by the Deep Carbon Observatory. The project will involve representatives from each of the DCO’s four scientific communities—Reservoirs and Fluxes, Deep Energy, Deep Life, and Extreme Physics and Chemistry—as they come together to craft a series of interoperable modules that can be used to model the quantities, movements, origins, and forms of deep Earth carbon. Though a fully functional, predictive model is the ultimate goal, the project promises to provide several ancillary benefits to the larger DCO effort, including identifying gaps in existing knowledge, increasing communication between the DCO’s diverse communities, and establishing project-wide modeling protocols that can serve as the basis for both current and future modeling efforts.