The Science on Screen program, based at Boston’s Coolidge Corner Theatre, creatively pairs screenings of classic or new release films with discussion of relevant scientific topics by notable scientists or technologists. Pairings featured in the Science on Screen program to date include a discussion of viral outbreaks paired with a screening of 12 Monkeys, a discussion of dog behavior and intelligence paired with a screening of Best in Show, and a discussion of the feasibility of time travel paired with a screening of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. This two-year grant to the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation will fund a small grant program designed to expand Science on Screen, allowing Coolidge to provide small grants to independent cinemas around the country that help offset the costs of running and publicizing their own Science on Screen series. Over the next two years, it is anticipated that at least forty new independent cinemas will sign on to the program, bringing the number of participating theaters nationwide to nearly one hundred.

Funds from this grant support the work of Brent Stephens at the Illinois Institute of Technology to develop and document an open network of inexpensive, standardized, and synchronized measurement devices for recording long-term indoor environmental and building operational parameters. Stephens will focus on the parameters that are most likely to influence indoor microbial communities, including environmental conditions (air temperature, relative humidity, light), characteristics of the building’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (air flow rates, air exchange rates), human occupancy, and surface environmental conditions (surface temperature and water activity).In addition to developing and testing the sensors themselves, Stephens will make public the documentation and directions for how to build and deploy the sensors. He will also prepare several peer-reviewed publications for the microbial ecology, building science, and sensor development communities.

This grant provides two years of continued support to microbiologist Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis for the continued operation and development of the Microbiology of the Built Environment network (microBE.net), a research network and associated website that aims to encourage collaboration, resource sharing, and information exchange in the growing multidisciplinary community of researchers working on understanding the built environment microbiome. Funded activities include the continued operation of the network website, the curation and creation of tools and other resources for researchers, the coordination of several meetings and workshops, and outreach to relevant stakeholders, including researchers, regulators, government funding agencies, and the public.

Funds from this grant support efforts by the American Council on Education (ACE) to understand and increase the impact of the Sloan Awards for Retirement Transitions, a series of awards given to 15 U.S. colleges and universities to honor and accelerate innovative, effective policies for successfully managing the culminating stages of faculty careers. First, ACE will monitor the progress of the 15 retirement award winners. They will collect campus reports as to how innovative practices and programs have been embedded in campus culture so that faculty members feel free to use them and are satisfied with the outcome. Second, from this group of 15 winners, ACE will select five to six institutions that are ready and committed to take their programs to the next level of institutional transformation. Three, ACE will identify three or four institutions that were initially interested in competing for the awards, but because of timing or other issues on their campuses, reluctantly chose not to compete. ACE will work closely with these schools to achieve the institutional changes necessary to support faculty in their final career stage as they are transitioning to retirement. Knowledge gained from these activities will be used to mount a deep and widespread communication effort within higher education to educate other institutions about effective ways that universities and colleges can change their campus cultures in order to support senior faculty choosing to work longer, assist them in transitioning to an active next career phase, and promote culminating career legacies.

In 2012, the Trustees of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation approved a $3.2 million grant to the University of Texas to support a project to re-contact and survey the original, nationally representative High School and Beyond (HSB) 1980 sophomore class cohort in order to assess the effects of early-life human capital on later-life labor market, health, and family outcomes. This new data set will provide scholars with access to a wealth of data collected contemporaneously when the respondents were adolescents and young adults. These data include measures of cognitive and noncognitive skills, school performance, standardized test scores, family socioeconomic origins, health, early life careers, and family formation. The new dataset will enable scholars to study in previously unavailable detail the antecedents of later life labor market activities. This grant provides supplemental support to that project by creating a pool of funds for incentive payments for survey participants to ensure an 80 percent response rate.

Funds of this grant support a new program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to sponsor a postdoctoral research fellow in each of the next three academic years, beginning in 2014 to 2015, whose research will focus on the economics of the aging workforce. Each fellow will receive one year of support to carry out research at NBER’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as to participate in the NBER summer institute workshops on Aging and Labor Studies. Selection of the three fellows will be made by a panel of experts who are members of both the Aging and Labor Studies programs at NBER. The committee’s decisions will be based on an evaluation of the fellows’ potential to make an important contribution to the understanding of the behavior of older workers and the functioning of labor markets for these workers.

One difficulty in understanding the labor market behavior of older workers is that much of the needed data is not available. For instance, the National Institute on Aging’s Health and Retirement Survey—the gold standard data set for examining aging—does not collect detailed information about the pecuniary and nonpecuniary job characteristics of older workers. As such, trends in retirement and other labor market behaviors of older workers cannot be correlated with data about what their jobs are like. This grant provides support for a project by the Rand Corporation to correct this gap by collecting new data describing the actual and preferred working conditions of approximately 2,200 older Americans between the ages of 55 and 70 in the ongoing, nationally representative RAND American Life Panel (ALP). The new dataset will be made publicly available to the broader research community; will serve as encouragement to younger scholars to do research on aging and work; and will inform evidence-based conversations with the National Institute on Aging about adding items on the pecuniary and nonpecuniary attributes of work to the Health and Retirement Survey.

Funds from this grant support an innovative study by Harvard University that explores how colleges and universities can promote faculty diversity. Led by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev and utilizing an original institutional-individual database on 13,000 faculty at 1,000 institutions from 1993 to 2013, the project team will examine the effects of academic hiring, promotion, diversity and work-life policies, and implementation supports on overall faculty diversity; career progress of STEM faculty from all race/ethnic-by-gender groups; and faculty family formation. Additionally, the team will specifically evaluate the impact of the Sloan Awards for Faculty Career Flexibility on these outcomes, and on the spread of flexibility policies beyond awardees and applicants.

With support from this grant, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation will work to accelerate and advance research and applications to understand and solve workforce aging issues in the United States, with a particular emphasis on reaching human resource professionals. SHRM Foundation will pursue multiple strategies related to research, education, and production of materials. They will conduct a review of the relevant economic, legal, and social science literature on older workers and summarize those findings for a non-specialist audience; they will study human resource policy and practice trends related to older workers; and they will develop new tools and programs to incentivize the adoption of best human resource practices with regard to the aging workforce. Expected products include four studies, an Effective Practice Guidelines report, an Aging Workforce Strategies DVE, and executive roundtable event, a webinar series, and an online Resource Guide/Toolkit for HR practitioners.

This grant supports research by Robert Clark and Melinda Morrill of North Carolina State University that will study the labor market behavior of more than 875,000 public employees in North Carolina. Collaborating with the office of the North Carolina Treasurer, Clark and Morrill will investigate a series of four interrelated questions retirement in the public sector. One, how do older public employees prepare for this transition through saving for retirement? Two, how do older public employees determine their optimal retirement age from their career employer? Three, do those workers retiring from public employment move into complete retirement or extend their working life by seeking post-retirement work elsewhere? Four, how do individuals choose among annuity options within their defined benefit and defined contribution plans? The research plan involves analysis of administrative data, three employee and retirement surveys, and a field experiment that tests how information affects employees’ retirement savings behavior.