This grant supports the work of Dr. Kenneth Medlock at Rice University to understand how new and proposed federal and local regulations will influence natural gas resource development and pricing in the United States. Medlock will identify the range of federal, state, and local policy options being proposed by specific stakeholders, legislators, and special interest groups regarding shale gas production in the United States. He will then specify several potential regulatory scenarios for analysis. Using the Rice World Gas Trade Model, he will then quantify the impact of proposed changes in regulation and taxation on the pace and scope of natural gas resource development and on the price of natural gas in different regions of the world. This analysis will allow him to highlight the regional and global market implications and the international geopolitical implications of the potential policies. Grant funds will support an initial exploratory workshop to identify relevant policies; analysis and modelling; an interim workshop; and a major capstone conference once his analysis is completed. Written products will include two to three academic papers, six to eight economic modeling projections with regional focus, a study monograph, and a policy white paper.

This grant provides continued research support to the Deep Energy community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Led by an international team of 21 scientists from eight nations and co-chaired by David Cole of Ohio State University and Isabelle Daniel of the University of Lyon, the Deep Energy research team is conducting an ambitious research agenda aimed at transforming our understanding of the origins, abundance, and distribution of abiotic hydrocarbons in the deep Earth. Over the next two years, the team will expand its sampling to 10 key geologically representative field sites around the globe; develop and deploy new instruments for sample collection and analysis; set common protocols for the collection, preservation, and analysis of samples; and work toward the development of rigorous, effective methods for distinguishing biotic from abiotic hydrocarbon.

This grant supports efforts to increase adoption of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), an enterprising new system that aims to provide a unique, persistent identifier to every researcher on the planet, allowing scholars, content aggregators, and the public to easily pull together research associated with that researcher’s ID, wherever it is published, however the author’s name appears. Funds from this grant will support expansion of ORCID through a small grant competition that challenges universities, professional societies, and other academic institutions to implement ORCID identifiers into existing repository, learning management, academic profile, conference management, and other technology platforms. Ten winners will be chosen from grant applicants based on the quality of the plans submitted and the likelihood that their work will lower barriers to ORCID adoption by peers.

One of the goals of Sloan’s Scholarly Communication program is to better facilitate the discovery and review of research products available on the Internet. Since many of these materials (from working papers to datasets) do not appear in conventional journals, a small but growing community has begun to explore the idea of alternative metrics of value and impact, ranging from downloads and inclusion in personal reference manager databases to social media references.Funds from this grant support the continued development of ImpactStory, an innovative altmetrics platform that aggregates citations and other mentions of academic scholarship on the Internet, including references from arXiv, Mendeley, PLOS, Dryad, PubMed and Scopus, as well as Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Grant funds support development of the platform and the creation and implementation of a long term institutional sustainability plan.

While there are currently many different ways to find out how much a given article or book has been cited, there is no way to know how many times it has appeared on a syllabus, and the impact of scholarly research in the classroom is a blind spot for which we have no accessible data. One could, for example, imagine a “syllabus count” alongside a citation count, not just for articles and books, but also for all sorts of other resources from datasets to websites. Beyond individual impact, a broad, computable archive of syllabi could be a valuable resource for research on the evolution of disciplines.This grant supports efforts by Joe Karaganis of the American Assembly to develop just such a resource.  Karaganis has assembled a diverse team of data providers, application designers and other collaborators to coordinate a planning and prototyping process aimed at bringing a robust syllabus archive to life.

Altmetrics aggregators who draw together diverse sources of data about the use of research products face a fundamental challenge: the myriad dissemination and archival platforms used by academics can make it difficult (if not impossible) to get consistent and normalized access to the data they need. While a general consensus is emerging among online publishers and repositories of articles, datasets, software, and other materials that such impact data could be valuable to their users, no clear standards exist governing how organizations should make that data accessible to others.This grant funds efforts by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to lead a two-year standard-setting process for altmetrics data. NISO will begin by hosting a series of scoping meetings over the first 12 months of the grant, bringing stakeholders together to map the most salient sources of data based on demand from altmetrics services as well as the researchers, funders, and deans that represent altmetrics end-users. After synthesizing those findings in a white paper for wide distribution, NISO will shift into a formal standards-setting process targeting the most pressing use cases, ultimately producing standard data exchange formats for adoption by those who produce and consume altmetrics data.

This grant provides one year of continued support to the Hamptons International Film Festival for a variety of interconnected activities to promote the development, production, and distribution of accurate, high-quality science themed screenplays and feature films. Supported activities include a feature film prize given to the best science-themed film submitted to the Festival; an accompanying panel and reception; a five-day screenwriters’ lab to assist writers with screenplays in development; a series of screenings of science-themed works in and around New York City; and a production grant to assist with the promotion of a high-quality science-themed film.

This grant provides two years of continued support for a series of initiatives at the Carnegie Mellon School of Dramatic Writing to encourage its film students to write high quality, accurate screenplays about science and technology or feature scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. Funded activities include a yearly symposium for film students introducing them to internationally recognized scientists; two semesters of training in screenwriting; guest-faculty workshops by accomplished mentor screenwriters; a program pairing students with scientific advisors to ensure the accuracy of scripts’ scientific content; the presentation of two awards for the best student science-themed script; and a variety of professional development activities, including industry showcases of student work in both Los Angeles and New York.

The grant provides two years of continued support to the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment (BioBE) Center, a pioneering research center founded with Sloan support and dedicated to developing a predictive science of the built environment microbiome through partnerships between architects and biologists. Over the next two years, the BioBE Center, led by microbiologist Jessica Green, will address two primary research questions: what dispersal vectors (e.g., ventilation and human occupancy) significantly influence the microbial profile of the built environment?  And what attributes of the built environment (e.g., building materials and interior temperature) shape microbial community composition indoors?  Research will be driven by the latest advances in microbiological instrumentation and methodology, including a climate-controlled chamber, microbiome diversity mapping, high throughput sequencing and analysis, and new visualization tools.  In addition to conducting basic research and disseminating results through peer-reviewed journals and conferences, the BioBE team will be involved in educating the next generation of built environment microbiologists, training at least one undergraduate student, three graduate students, two postdoctoral fellows, and two architectural research faculty; and developing a new undergraduate course focused on the biology of the built environment.

This grant supports the expansion of a major $9 million, multi-institutional research project funded by the National Institute of Health. The NIH study aims to determine the bacterial community composition of 340 paired house dust and infant stool samples in a case cohort epidemiological study. Sloan funds will enable the research team to expand their analysis to not just bacteria, but fungi. Led Dr. Susan Lynch of the University of California, San Francisco, the research team will perform high resolution fungal community profiling of the 340 paired samples, conduct a variety of statistical analyses to determine whether relationships exist between fungal and bacterial community composition in house dust and infant stool, and use multivariate regression analysis to relate fungal/bacterial house dust microbiome composition to measure house characteristics and allergic disease outcomes to identify key factors that influence the home and infant stool microbiome and are related to human health status.