This grant provides partial support to the for the development and broadcast of a major, fact-based dramatic television series about how the Civil War led to major advances in medical science, including spurring innovations in emergency medicine, surgery, and epidemiology.  The bloodiest armed conflict in U.S. history, the Civil War claimed two lives from infection and disease for every life lost to injury or gunshot wound.  The series will depict historical figures like Dr. Jonathan Letterman, the father of battlefield medicine who developed the ambulance corps and the three stage evacuation system still in use today.  Other characters will include Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; Dr. W.W. Keen, a celebrated neurosurgeon; and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Edward Squibb.  These figures will provide dramatic examples of how the exigencies created by the need to treat wounded and dying soldiers led to pioneering advances in trauma care, anesthesia, neurosurgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery, and prosthetics.

Funds from this grant support the work of chemists Paul Ziemann and Jose-Luis Jimenez of the University of Colorado Boulder to improve our fundamental scientific understanding of the basic chemistry of aerosols in indoor environments. Using state-of-the-art instrumentation and methodology, Ziemann and Jimenez will measure the chemical composition of unperturbed and aged gases, aerosol particles, and surfaces in two to three homes and buildings; conduct laboratory studies of gases, aerosols, and surface films formed from reactions of organic chemicals commonly found in indoor air and on human occupants with O3 and NO3 radicals, water, and acids; and begin to develop theoretical models that explain these chemical reactions.Because environmental chemistry to date has focused virtually exclusively on the reactions taking place outdoors, the supported research fills a lacuna in our scientific understanding of the world.

In many scientific fields, the process of cleaning and preparing data is managed by increasingly well-established software pipelines. Raw data goes in and structured, refined data comes out ready for analysis. Data pipelines are particularly valuable in fields where the data coming out of instruments are relatively standardized—genomic sequencers, for example, or astronomical telescopes. One potential benefit of data pipelines is that they lower the barriers to sophisticated data visualization, since platforms to explore data visually could be directly connected to data pipelines rather than rely on costly work by individual researchers to prepare and load data. Yet while basic visualization capabilities have been hard-wired to specific data pipelines, there is no generic framework that could interface between data pipelines and data visualization tools.This grant supports efforts by biologist Holly Bik of the University of California, Davis to develop just such a framework. Partnering with leading data visualization firm Pitch Interactive, Bik will work with an initial set of use cases to develop a framework for data visualization on top of existing genomic data pipelines, keeping an eye toward its applicability to other fields.

Three open source programming languages form a canon of sorts for the emerging field of data science: Python for general computation; Hadoop for managing massive unstructured data; and R for statistical analysis. Funds from this grant support efforts by Karthik Ram, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, to expand and strengthen the R community through the development of products aimed at lowering the barriers to the use of R. Ram has developed an R software module, for instance, that greatly simplifies the process of gathering data from archives and services commonly accessed by scientists, like Dryad, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Ram’s module thus obviates the need for scientists to write their own idiosyncratic code to parse data from such repositories. Grant funds will support the further development of R modules by Ram and his team, as well as outreach efforts to the scientific community to provide training and speed adoption of the new tools.

This project funds an ambitious project by Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, to develop and expand an institutional framework for collaborative scientific work—the Open Science Framework (OSF)—that’s modeled on the open source development protocols that have been so successful in the cooperative development of software. Nosek’s project is based on the insight that scientists could develop much more efficient collaboration practices, saving themselves time and improving the quality and velocity of their work, by borrowing the basic methods and tools of open software development. These include versioning (creating an edit log that tracks changes to any files associated with a project), “tagged releases” (locking a particular, tested version of a project for broader dissemination), “forking” (creating a personal copy of a project to add one’s own edits or additions), and “pull requests” (a request to the owner of a project to merge changes in a “forked” version back into the original). Funded activities include further development of the OSF, the construction of an applications programming interface that would allow the OSF to seamlessly interoperate with other tools and platforms, and collaborations with other developers of scientific cyberinfrastructure.

Since 2009, with support from the Sloan and Hewlett Foundation’s, the Arius Association has been working to promote regional nuclear waste repositories outside of Europe. If such repositories could be brought into existence, they would result in the centralized disposal of dangerous nuclear wastes in a manner that would be more cost-effective, safe, and secure (from both a nonproliferation and dirty bomb perspective) than if each country with a small nuclear power program had responsibility for disposing of its own high-level nuclear waste. Funds from this grant provide support for Arius’ continued work on this issue, including an expansion of the scope of their efforts to include discussion of regional repositories for radioactive wastes from universities, hospitals, and industry. Supported activities over the next two years include a series of workshops in Arab regions and in Asia; the production of a draft constitution and work program for a regional nuclear repository organization; development of an IAEA report on multinational nuclear waste repositories; and a series of high-level papers aimed at specialists and policymakers.