Funds from this grant support the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, an annual conference hosted by the Board of Control for Southern Regional Education, a 3.5-day professional development conference aimed at providing training, mentoring, career advice, and networking opportunities to African-American and Hispanic Ph.D. students. Funds will be used to support the organization of the conference for each of the next three years and to defray the costs of attendance by, program directors, faculty, and students involved in the Foundation's Minority Ph.D. program.

Founded 50 years ago, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. Over 700 institutions from all over the world belong to this consortium based at the University of Michigan, and its archives contain over 500,000 data files. This grant funds a project led by economic historian and ICPSR Director George Alter to help set standards and address challenges common to social science researchers who work with "big data." Grant funds will support three workshops that will aim to (1) develop consensus among social science journal editors about how to review, publish, and cite data; (2) develop common standards in a variety of scientific fields about how to archive data files and the "metadata" that describes them; and (3) develop a consensus among scientific grantmaking organizations about what data management standards should be imposed on grantees. Additional monies from this grant support a project to investigate the nondisclosure agreements (NDA) many social scientists sign in order to gain access to proprietary information and to explore the possibility of developing a common non-disclosure agreement on the model of the popular license developed by Creative Commons.

One of the few advantages of our complex tax code is that the information gathered can, in principle, provide researchers with accurate estimates of wages, investments, retirement savings, and many other economic variables. In practice, however, it is very hard for researchers to gain access to that information. Recognizing the demand for such data, the Internal Revenue Service has begun making more of its information available in aggregated tables and in de-identified compilations known as "Public Use Files." This two-year grant funds a project by the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, to help make IRS data more useful to researchers, policymakers, and the public. Over the course of the next two years, researchers at the Tax Policy Center propose to add new information to existing IRS data offerings, including data about age, gender, and how joint earnings are split between couples. They will also develop new methodologies for estimating the characteristics of those who do not file taxes, allowing more robust conclusions to be drawn from IRS data. New data and methodologies will be developed and added in ways that protect taxpayer anonymity and privacy.

Casual discussions of the scientific and technical workforce often rely on a pipeline metaphor. In this picture, there is an ample supply of student interest to begin with, but leakage at critical junctures leaves only a trickle of graduates who actually pursue careers in STEM. The obvious remedy is to plug the leaks. But perhaps the "pipeline" theory is an easy but misleading oversimplification. This grant supports a project by Hal Salzman of Rutgers to investigate how various pathways can lead through the educational system to STEM careers. Using the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, Salzman and his team will analyze the complex ways that course-taking patterns relate to decisions about STEM majors and careers, including how students (a) use college as a period of exploration; (b) may benefit from majoring in STEM without pursuing a traditional STEM career; (c) can major in a non-STEM field but still do lots of science in classes or at work; (d) make choices that are influenced by both supply and demand variables; and (e) can thereby end up in scientific careers by way of nonlinear and nontraditional routes. The resulting picture, complemented by a series of interviews with students and site views to universities, promises to help build a more robust, nuanced of the myriad ways in which students may end up in scientific careers.

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most important statistic in macroeconomics. As a measure of the value of goods and services produced within a country, GDP announcements can swing stock markets, political sentiments, business plans, and much else. Yet despite its importance, GDP figures--calculated in the U.S. by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) --are merely estimates and often subject to substantial subsequent revision. With businesses, politicians, and consumers making choices based on GDP data, however, such revisions can be costly. With so much at stake, the methodology for estimating GDP and similar statistics is the subject of constant scrutiny. This grant supports a major international conference about macroeconomic statistics to be held in August 2012. Conference participants will include a host of venerable research and government institutions, including the BEA, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Grant funds will offset conference costs, support the commissioning of papers for conference sessions on GDP revisions and new GDP data sources, and enable the publication of a selection of peer-reviewed papers from the conference.

This grant provides continuing support to an initiative at New York City's Manhattan Theatre Club to commission, produce, and promote new science-themed plays from emerging, midlevel, and established playwrights. Grant funds support a series of interrelated activities, including the commissioning of four new science-themed plays per year, public and private readings of scripts in progress, and an annual workshop.

This grant supports activities in support of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' (AAAS) Global Nuclear Future Initiative, an international effort that focuses on increasing the security of nuclear materials, strengthening the global nuclear regime, and solving the unresolved problem of what to do with spent nuclear reactor fuel. Led by Stephen Miller, Director of Harvard University's International Security Program, the project aims to build international consensus around a series of prescriptions for strengthening nuclear security, including principles governing the development of regional nuclear storage facilities; best practices governing contracts between suppliers, customers, and government entities; and the proper arrangements connecting nuclear fuel storage and disposal. Supported activities under this grant include the convening of regional meetings of key stakeholders in government, industry, and non-governmental organizations and the commissioning of conference presentations and publishable research papers by respected experts, academics, and practitioners in the field.

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, at the same time, preventing weapons proliferation. This grant supports an initiative by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to build an international consensus around how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate nuclear activity. The Carnegie team will convene policymakers, regulators, and technical personnel from the five permanent member countries of the UN Security Council - China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States - for a series of non-political meetings to discuss national perspectives on what constitutes illegitimate nuclear activity, weigh the costs and benefits of potential frameworks, and identify areas for further technical analysis.

Though few deny that administrative and other large-linked datasets represent new frontiers for social science research, there have been surprisingly few formal studies that survey and document how so-called "big data" in all its forms is actually changing social science research. This grant supports a project by a team led by Eric T. Meyer at Oxford's Internet Institute (OII) to empirically document the ways social scientists are getting access to data at scale and the tools they use to work with it. Meyer and his team will conduct a series of in-depth interviews with 125 researchers and technologists in academia, industry, and government to look at a series of interrelated questions about how big data is changing research, including how data flows between data sources and scientists, what questions big data is being used to address, how does the openness of a dataset affect its use, and how public and private data are used differently by researchers.