Funds from this grant provide three years of continued support to New York City’s Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) for the creation and development of new American plays that explore scientific or technological themes or feature scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. EST will commission between ten and twenty new plays per year from emerging and established playwrights, stage a production of a science-themed play annually, and host the First Light Festival, an annual month-long celebration of science-themed plays that includes panels, workshops, and staged readings of plays in development.

This grant provides support for the expansion of a successful postdoctoral fellowship program run by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The program aims to help academic libraries provide a new set of services that support data- and computation-intensive research through funding postdoctoral fellows devoted to data management and curation in the natural and social sciences. Grant funds will provide salary support to two cohorts of fellows (ten in 2013 and 12 in 2014) as well as various support and training activities such as professional training, travel, and networking with other data curation professionals.