Grants Database

The Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships), totaling roughly $80 million dollars in annual commitments in support of research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. This database contains grants for currently operating programs going back to 2008. For grants from prior years and for now-completed programs, see the annual reports section of this website.

Grants Database

Grantee
Amount
City
Year
  • grantee: Columbia University
    amount: $650,000
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2014

    To support seven field studies integral to the success of the Deep Carbon Observatory

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Deep Carbon Observatory
    • Investigator Peter Kelemen

    This grant to the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) supports seven field studies, including the extraction and analysis of deep Earth drilling cores, at seven sites around the globe. Sample types and locations include: Hydrocarbons and microbes from fluids, Canadian Shield (Ontario, Canada); Surface-collected, carbon-bearing sediments and carbonate reefs, North Pole Dome (Western Australia); Hydrocarbons and deep microbes recovered from drilling, Songliao Basin (Northeastern China); High-pressure metamorphic rocks, graphite, and carbonates, Alpine Corsica (France); Possibly abiotic hydrocarbons recovered from drilling, Romashkino oil field (Tatarstan, Russia); (Sub)seafloor methane hydrates (clathrates), water-column methane, Eastern Siberian Arctic Ocean Seafloor; Altered ocean crust and mantle, Samail ophiolite (Oman). Sites were selected through a year-long collaborative process involving the entire DCO community.  Together with cores already in repositories, new samples from these sites will complement the two dozen other locations where researchers are already working (such as volcanoes) in a way that DCO leaders believe will allow the program to achieve its decadal goals. 

    To support seven field studies integral to the success of the Deep Carbon Observatory

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  • grantee: The Miami Foundation Inc
    amount: $260,000
    city: Miami, FL
    year: 2014

    To grow Dat, a system for real-time replication, transformation, and versioning of large tabular data sets, into a vibrant, healthy open source project

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Max Ogden

    Github, the collaborative software development and versioning platform, has become so essential to the software development ecosystem that scientists have begun experimenting with using it for the collaborative versioning and sharing of datasets.  Though the potential value is immense, Github was designed to handle software code containing thousands of lines per file, not tabular datasets containing millions of entries.  Large datasets of the kind regularly used by scientists grinds the system to a halt.  Moreover, tabular data, unlike textual software code, might exist in any one of myriad data formats ranging from comma?separated to Excel to SQL.  Funds from this grant provide support for the development of a solution to this problem, a Git-esque platform called “Dat.”  Created by open source developer Max Ogden, Dat borrows heavily from Github’s syntax and mechanics, but is optimized for large-scale tabular data and has been programmed to be able to translate seamlessly between  the wide variety of formats commonly used to store data.   Grant funds will support the hiring of two developers: one focused on core development and one focused on providing interfaces useful to researchers and on ensuring the system’s interoperability with existing scientific data repositories. Additional funds will support outreach and partnership building with stakeholders in the scientific community.

    To grow Dat, a system for real-time replication, transformation, and versioning of large tabular data sets, into a vibrant, healthy open source project

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  • grantee: Mozilla Foundation
    amount: $819,480
    city: Mountain View, CA
    year: 2014

    To build educational resources, prototype tools, and foster an ongoing dialogue between the open web community and researchers in order to make science more open, collaborative, and efficient

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Kaitlin Thaney

    Since 2011, the Mozilla Foundation, developer of the popular Firefox web browser, has hosted a series of “Software Carpentry” boot camps developed by computer scientist Greg Wilson to teach basic software engineering practices to researchers who in a professional capacity were writing code to manage data but had never received any formal software development training.  The project has been a success.  Interest in the boot camps has been robust both in the U.S. and Europe and Mozilla has expanded their effort into a larger project, called the Open Science Lab,  aimed at collaborating with the scientific community to develop open source tools and other resources to aid in scientific research and collaboration.  Funds from this grant provide continued operational support to Mozilla for this project.

    To build educational resources, prototype tools, and foster an ongoing dialogue between the open web community and researchers in order to make science more open, collaborative, and efficient

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  • grantee: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
    amount: $149,997
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2014

    To tie off ongoing efforts to develop an objective assessment methodology for distinguishing between legitimate peaceful nuclear activity and illegitimate nuclear weapons activities

    • Program Research
    • Sub-program Energy and Environment
    • Investigator George Perkovich

    The foundational treaty of the global nuclear order, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), does not define what constitutes a nuclear weapon and therefore what activities, technologies, and materials should be regarded as evidence that a state is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. This lack of definition exacerbates the nonproliferation challenge of distinguishing between legitimate nuclear activities (be they peaceful or military applications such as naval propulsion) and illegitimate ones (namely, those oriented toward nuclear weapons). This challenge, in turn, exacerbates the difficulty of promoting the peaceful spread of nuclear energy while preventing weapons proliferation. This grant provides continued support to an initiative by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to build an international, science-based, de-politicized consensus around how to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate nuclear activity as defined by the NPT. Funds will support preparation for an international meeting of stakeholders in Beijing in 2014, finalization of technical documentation, the identification of use-cases and potential applications of the new identification regime, and outreach and communication efforts aimed at garnering broad international support.

    To tie off ongoing efforts to develop an objective assessment methodology for distinguishing between legitimate peaceful nuclear activity and illegitimate nuclear weapons activities

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  • grantee: Johns Hopkins University
    amount: $602,039
    city: Baltimore, MD
    year: 2014

    To design and launch a data curation infrastructure that provides a graph-based view of the relationships between publications and data

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator G. Choudhury

    Though the Sloan Foundation has funded several initiatives to make the citation of data a regular, established practice in science, data citation is itself unidirectional.  In a properly cited scientific article, the reader will know what datasets are being referenced and used, but the creator or curator of those cited datasets may have no way to know his or her data is being cited.  Yet knowing how a dataset is being used and by whom can be a crucial factor in making decisions about its value, how to extend it, and how to increase its usefulness.   This grant supports work by Sayeed Choudhury, associate dean for research data management at Johns Hopkins University, to develop a third-party service called “Matchmaker” that would independently map the relationships between articles and data, linking between existing publishing platforms and data repositories.  These relationships could be created by a number of different stakeholders in the scholarly communication process:  by a publisher, by a data archive, by an individual researcher, or even by a library.  When fully developed, these relationships would then form a "graph" that could be queried without having to repeatedly poll every repository and publisher, a complement to more traditional citation services like ISI or Google Scholar.

    To design and launch a data curation infrastructure that provides a graph-based view of the relationships between publications and data

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  • grantee: Association of Research Libraries
    amount: $500,000
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2014

    To support the initial development and launch of the SHARE Notification System, a structured way to report and notify parties of research release events

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Elliott Shore

    In 2013, a White House Office of Science & Technology Policy directive outlined new open-access expectations for research products funded by the federal government.  One question left open by the directive, however, is how exactly those materials should be managed and made discoverable, particularly for the long term.  Funds from this grant support a project by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to facilitate compliance with the OSTP directive by developing a platform for reporting and notifying parties of events related to the release of publicly and privately funded research.  Partnering with the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the ARL will create a multi-institutional platform, the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), that will tie together existing university-based institutional repositories into a coherent discovery and compliance tracking system.  When completed, SHARE will function as connective tissue that will enable others to build user-facing services that build on the multi-institutional architecture, leveraging university investments in their own institutional repositories and providing a valuable resource to help university offices of sponsored research meet their reporting and compliance-tracking obligations.

    To support the initial development and launch of the SHARE Notification System, a structured way to report and notify parties of research release events

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  • grantee: University of Montreal
    amount: $359,991
    city: Montreal, QC, Canada
    year: 2014

    To support greater understanding of social media in scholarly communication and the actual meaning of various altmetrics

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Vincent Lariviиre

    The rise of the Internet and digitally enabled means of disseminating scholarly research has led to a burgeoning interest in “altmetrics,” alternative measures of the impact and importance of scholarship that extend beyond traditional measures like citation counts. Funds from this grant support efforts by Vincent Lariviere and Stefanie Haustein of the University of Montreal and their colleague Cassidy Sugimoto of Indiana propose to dig deeper into the relative value and meaning of two specific altmetric indicators:  social media tweets and “saves” by popular bibliographic reference manager platforms.  The researcher team will match bibliographic and citation data from the Web of Science (linked with the same articles as they appear in PubMed and arXiv) with these forms of altmetric activity in order to answer a set of questions about the relationship between altmetric signals and the ultimate impact of a given work as traditionally measured in citation.  Particular focus will be given to the relationship, if any, between initial attention paid to preprints or working papers and the subsequent citation of formally published versions of those same papers.

    To support greater understanding of social media in scholarly communication and the actual meaning of various altmetrics

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  • grantee: Hypothesis Project
    amount: $683,000
    city: San Francisco, CA
    year: 2014

    To support further development and pilot adoption of the hypothes.is web annotation platform

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Dan Whaley

    This grant provide 14 months of support for the Hypothes.is Project, a web annotation platform that aims to bring granular annotation of online scholarly materials to users through the development of an easy-to-use interface that makes web annotation fully collaborative, shareable, and searchable.  Grant funds will support continued development of the Hypothes.is platform as well as three pilot implementations, one at the American Geophysical Union, one at the arXiv preprint repository, and one at eLife, an influential online journal sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  Additional funds support a 2014 summit for Hypothes.is stakeholders to ensure compliance with current and forthcoming standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium.

    To support further development and pilot adoption of the hypothes.is web annotation platform

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  • grantee: Institute of International Education
    amount: $750,000
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2014

    To provide life-saving fellowships and academic placements for persecuted scholars from around the world

    • Program
    • Investigator Daniela Kaisth

    The Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF), begun in 2002, provides persecuted scholars from around the world with one- to two-year fellowships that allow threatened scholars to pursue their academic and scientific studies in the safety of one of the Fund’s partner institutions.  This grant provides three years of continued support to the Scholar Rescue Fund for these activities.  Grant funds will provide life-saving fellowships for an estimated eight to ten persecuted scholars per year and help defray administrative costs associated with identifying, rescuing, and finding appropriate host institutions for endangered scholars world-wide.

    To provide life-saving fellowships and academic placements for persecuted scholars from around the world

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  • grantee: University of Oklahoma
    amount: $351,844
    city: Norman, OK
    year: 2014

    To build an open-access, digital research platform for the global history of science community centered on data from the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Scholarly Communication
    • Investigator Stephen Weldon

    Funds from this grant support a series of projects to increase the usefulness of the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, the oldest and largest bibliography in its field and an invaluable resource to historians of science worldwide.  Using grant funds, Isis Bibliographer Stephen Weldon and his team will spearhead a series of initiatives designed to bring the ISIS Bibliography more fully into the digital era, including retrospective digitization, data extraction, and cleanup of the existing bibliography; the development of new researcher-facing tools and interfaces; “community-sourced” mechanisms for maintaining the bibliography going forward; and a mini-grant program to incentivize novel or innovative ways of utilizing the bibliography as a scholarly resource.

    To build an open-access, digital research platform for the global history of science community centered on data from the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science

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