This grant to the University of Colorado at Denver supports efforts by Tanya Heikkila and Christopher Weible to study the politics of shale gas development in the United States. Using a wide-ranging series of interviews, Heikkila, Wieble and their team will construct a map of the political actors and influencers active in the recent development of the Marcellus, Barnett, and Mancos shale formations with the aim of understanding the politics of shale gas development. Issues to be addressed include how different interest groups frame the issue of shale gas development, how they use and deploy scientific information, what media and engagement strategies they use, and how they interact with other interest groups and with policymakers and to what effect. If successful, Hikkila and Weible's work could potentially lead to a deeper understanding of how the politics of shale gas development is evolving both nationally and regionally, an understanding that will be of value to all parties involved in shale gas development: industry, advocacy groups, regulators, policymakers, and the public.

Alongside data scientists trained in the statistical and computational methods that are integral to analysis of data at scale, there is a growing need for "digital curators," professional staff who can steward data, code, and other research products from the lab into more durable archives. Such digital curation is often discussed as one function of the future academic research library. Unfortunately, while many university libraries want to explore this new function, institutional inertia, tight budgets, and existing organizational structures have inhibited rapid change. Funds from this grant support a project by the Council on Library and Information Resources to expand its existing post-doctoral program to prepare recent science and social science Ph.D.s for positions in data curation. Grant monies will provide partial support for the development and training of a cohort of six postdoctoral students over two years. Supported students will be placed at university libraries where they will contribute to efforts to expand the institution's digital curation capabilities. Training activities funded under this grant include an initial "boot camp" that exposes participants to the current best practices in data curation, monthly professional development webinars, and an annual retreat.

This grant provides partial support for data collection, production, and distribution of a study by the National Research Council on the training of professionals in data curation. Convening a high caliber group of scientists, technologists, educators, and university administrators, the Academy will study a handful of pioneering programs around the country that have developed curricula for training students in data curation and synthesize these curricula into a set of best practices with an eye toward preparing students for the specific data curation needs of researchers in the natural and social sciences. In addition, the report will focus on quantifying future need for data curation as a profession. The report promises to provide a blueprint for other U.S. colleges and universities who wish to begin their own programs to meet the growing need for qualified, well-trained professionals with expertise in stewarding, archiving, and maintaining data.

The cooperative, international Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) aims to examine the forms, volumes, and movements of carbon deep in the Earth at an unprecedented scale as well as in unprecedented detail. Success within this decade requires not only new samples, but also new ways of sampling and instruments variously more sensitive, smaller, larger, more robust, and less susceptible to contamination. This grant to the Deep Carbon Observatory headquarters at the Carnegie Institution of Washington provides funds to help develop four pioneering instruments and to conduct three "sandpit" exercises to spur development of several more. "Sandpit" is a term popularized in recent years to describe team?oriented workshops with a specific, collective problem?solving goal and some funds to follow through. The four proposed instruments are the following: a combined instrument for molecular imaging in geochemistry to measure trace amounts of carbon in lower mantle or core mineral phases and transform our estimates of the global carbon budget; a quantum cascade laser-infrared absorption spectrometer for clumped methane isotope thermometry to explore methane formation temperatures; a large-volume diamond anvil cell to explore material properties at very high pressure that have been examined before only in tiny volumes; and an ultrafast laser spectrometer to assess thermodynamic properties, reaction mechanisms, and kinetics of carbon processes at conditions of deep pressure and high temperature. The three sandpit exercises would address high-pressure, high-temperature bioreactors; use of remote sensing (for example, to measure outgassing from volcanoes); and computational resources and software.