This grant provides two years of continuing support to fungal taxonomists Keith Seifert and Rob Samson for their taxonomy studies of fungi isolated from indoor dust samples from homes on six continents. Over the next two years, Seifert and Samson will complete taxonomic studies of up to 200 new species of fungi isolated from house dust, isolate xerophilic fungi from newly collected samples, and consolidate their data into an openly accessible online database.  The team will share their findings and reference materials through peer-reviewed publications, including a special issue of the leading mycology journal Studies in Mycology, presentations at scholarly meetings, and through the open access database.  At least two postdoctoral fellows, one graduate student, and four undergraduate students will be trained under the grant.

This grant provides two years of continued support for a partnership between National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press (AP) to marry NORC’s research expertise with AP’s media reach to create a vehicle for promoting public understanding of critical social issues. Funds from this grant will provide two years of salary support to a NORC-AP fellow who will cover the older work force beat, producing thoughtful, scientifically informed, high-quality articles on a variety of issues, including aging and work, retirement, flexible work arrangements for older workers, productivity, and the economic impact of an aging work force on businesses, pensions, and government programs like Social Security.  In addition, NORC will field a high-quality, nationally representative survey of older adults about issues facing older workers with the results distributed nationwide through the AP. Survey reporting will be supplemented with reporting on new economic research on the older work force and survey data will be made freely available to researchers in a public-use dataset.

This grant to Alicia Munnell and her colleagues at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College supports research on the aging work force through the lens of workers’ socio-economic status (SES).  Munnell and her team will launch five integrated projects related to retirement, financial security, and employment opportunities that address the following questions.   How long do people need to work to achieve a financially secure retirement? How would retirement ages vary if they reflected differential mortality by socio-economic status? How does job-changing affect the ability to retire securely? How do job opportunities narrow with age? How much would reducing the price of older workers’ labor increase their attractiveness to employers? The project promises fill significant gaps in our understanding of the older work force.

This grant to the Wikimedia Foundation provides continued administrative and operational support for Wikipedia, the fifth largest website in the world and the largest encyclopedia in history.  Over the next five years, grant funds will be used in a series of projects to bolster Wikipedia’s technical infrastructure, improve editor engagement, increase the number of women editors, increase the number of contributions via mobile devices, better integrate multimedia offerings such as video, audio, and photography into Wikipedia pages, and help Wikipedia improve and monitor article quality while moving toward self-sustainability.

Funds from this grant support a series of surveys, tests, and experiments by Princeton behavioral psychologist Eldar Shafir that examine scarcity and its implications for the social and behavioral sciences.  Findings to date suggest that how closely people’s behavior complies with standard economic models of rationality depends interestingly on the constraints they face when making decisions.  Shafir has found that those who are poor (or put into an experimental situation of scarcity) often act more like the rational “homo economicus” posited by normative economic theorists.  In contrast, those who are rich (or who are put into an experimental situation of plenty) often exhibit curious biases and behavioral anomalies that deviate from what standard economic models predict.  Abundance, Shafir’s research suggests, makes inconsistency and irrationality more affordable.  The findings stand in stark contrast to the widespread belief that those in poverty make poor economic decisions.  The truth may be exactly the reverse. This grant will fund the continuation and expansion of Shafir’s research over the next three years, allowing deeper investigation of what factors explain behavioral deviation from traditional economic models and the implication for the design and implementation of policy interventions. 

Behavioral economics should have many implications for government policy.  With this motivation, the Prime Minister’s Office in the U.K. established a Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) in 2010 to help bring insights from behavioral economics to the design and evaluation of government policy. The BIT’s successes in a wide variety of areas—from tax collection to energy efficiency to organ donation—have inspired other countries to launch similar initiatives, including Australia, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States. The academics and government officials leading such efforts have much to gain by comparing notes with one another.  This grant funds a joint effort by David Halpern, head of the BIT in the U.K., and Max Bazerman, head of the Behavioral Insights Group (BIG) at Harvard, to organize a series of meetings, international conferences, and advanced courses that will bring together researchers from all over the globe to exchange the latest insights on the intersection of behavioral research and public policy.

Funds from this grant provide support for a project by WNYC to produce a series of radio segments focusing on health care policy and the economics of the health care system in New York as viewed through the lens of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  Using a mix of personal stories, stakeholder interviews, data news, enterprise reporting, and in-depth conversations on the impact of the ACA, WNYC hopes to make the health care system more transparent to consumers.  The idea is to use this historic, confusing, and still controversial health care Act as a teaching moment for the public and to get at the underlying economics and health care policy that few understand well.  Additional focus will be on advances in medical science and methods that motivate behavior change for healthier living.   WNYC will produce 100 short news reports about the ACA, health care, and health care policy in the New York region for broadcast on programs like Morning Edition and All Things Considered and for follow-up discussion in segments on WNYC signature programs.  They will also produce two one-hour series each year that delve more deeply into topics such as how health care reform is affecting the city’s most vulnerable populations.  In addition, WNYC will launch a new, weekly podcast aimed at prompting healthier consumer behavior and choices, create interactive graphics and charts to make complex health and economic data more accessible, and hold two public events that will allow members of the public to engage with WNYC and policymakers, practitioners, and other experts.

This grant provides support to Bari Scott and SoundVision Productions for the continued production of their popular and ambitious multimedia radio series on energy, BURN: An Energy Journal.  Using grant funds, SoundVision will produce an in-depth one-hour special The Adaptors about energy innovators, entrepreneurs, and average citizens and their creative adaptations to our energy future; a series of at least 12 five- to eight-minute features on energy to air on Marketplace, The World, and All Things Considered; 52 eight- to 15-minute podcasts about energy, distributed via iTunes and Soundcloud; a multimedia website with enhanced information, blogs, maps, infographics, and video science explainers; and 50 to 100 two- to three-minute videos on Soundcloud that will also be posted to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and Tumblr.

This grant provides scholarship funds for an anticipated 59 master’s and 20 Ph.D. students to be recruited and enrolled over the next three years by the four institutional partners in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership, a national network of four educational institutions that aim to increase the number of American Indians and Alaska Natives that obtain postgraduate degrees in STEM fields. The following is the expected breakdown of scholarships by campus:  $385,200 to the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks); $712,500 to the University of Arizona; $620,000 to the Montana University system; and $353,338 to Purdue University.  Scholarships in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership are administered and disbursed by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.

This grant provides support to Purdue University for its administrative, organizational, and infrastructure costs associated with the continued operation of the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP), a national network of four universities and university systems that aim to increase the number of indigenous Americans and Alaska Natives that obtain postgraduate degrees in STEM fields.  Over the next three years the SIGP institutions—Purdue University, University of Arizona, the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks), and the University of Montana system (University of Montana, Montana Tech, and Montana State University)—plan to recruit 59 talented American Indian or Native Alaska students into STEM master’s programs and 20 students into STEM Ph.D. programs.  Grant funds will support SIGP partner institutions as they engage in various administrative and infrastructure-building activities over the next three years, including community-building; collection, sharing, and analysis of data on student outcomes and programmatic effectiveness; and the launch of a new intercampus student exchange program.  Scholarship funds for students supported through the SIGP program are provided through a separate grant to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.