As the U.S. retirement landscape has shifted from one dominated by defined benefit plans (DB) to one dominated by defined contribution plans (DC), older Americans have had to assume more responsibility, as well as more risk, in ensuring their long-term financial security. To that end, they must make complicated income strategy decisions: how long to work; when to retire; whether to work post-retirement; and how strategically to utilize their DC assets and Social Security benefits. This grant supports a project by Stanford economist John Shoven, and Occidental College professor Sita Slavov to analyze and evaluate the potential financial benefits of a specific income strategy that they refer to as the "series" strategy. Utilizing this strategy, older Americans would first deplete their DC assets before drawing on their Social Security benefits, hence using their retirement resources serially. Shoven and Slavov plan to clarify how-under specific conditions that individuals and couples face, such as both working or one earning more than the other-the "series strategy" could lead to more attractive returns relative to the more typically-used "parallel" strategy, where older Americans simultaneously use their defined pension accumulations to supplement Social Security, hence using them in parallel to one another. Preliminary analyses suggest there are substantial financial benefits to the "series" strategy for older Americans, in large part due to the fact that Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation and increase as initial payments are delayed. Addition grant funds will support the publication of a publicly available brochure laying out Shoven and Slavov's conclusions and a conference directed at informing federal policymakers, researchers, financial advisors, and other relevant stakeholders about the research.

This grant to John Palfrey and Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Berkman Center) provides funding for an intense process of meetings, workshops, plenaries, research, pilot digitization, technical prototype development, and community building that will lead to the launch of a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Over the next two years, Palfrey and his team will coordinate at least 22 workshops divided among six major interrelated workstreams covering various aspects of the DPLA: content and scope, audience participation, technical architecture, finance/business models, legal issues, and governance. Each workstream will arrive at a plan of action for ensuring the best outcome for an integrated national digital library system that provides seamless access to digital resources.

Little is known about the biology of microbial populations living in our drinking water. Current systems monitor drinking water for the absence of fecal bacteria using coliform counts, a very old method, and for total bacterial load, which is determined by growing cultures of bacteria found in water samples. Yet 99.99% of bacteria cannot be successfully grown in culture, and thus are missed by using such methods. Our drinking water, in other words, is monitored using very old and inaccurate techniques. This three year grant will fund a project led by Professor Norman Pace at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to use state-of-the art gene sequencing techniques to begin to characterize the microbial populations in municipal water delivery systems. Preliminary work by Pace and his research team on the municipal water supply in Boulder, Colorado has revealed a diverse and (perhaps) stable microbial profile in the Boulder municipal water system, one that differs significantly from the microbial populations in water supplies in New York, New Orleans, and Austin. Funds from this grant will allow Pace to continue and expand this work, as well as provide support for a smaller project to measure how concrete degradation, a common problem in aging municipal water deliver infrastructure, affects microbial populations in the water supply, and funds to complete Pace's ongoing work examining how the flooding of an engineering building on the University of Colorado, Boulder campus changed the characteristics of microbial communities inside the building.

The goal of the Foundation's Indoor Environment program is to grow a new field of scientific inquiry that eventually will be funded by traditional U.S. government funding agencies. This grant to Mark Hernandez of the University of California, Boulder will fund three annual conferences to bring together the large, diverse, multidisciplinary community of biologists, engineers, architects, and others studying the microbiology of built environments. At the conferences, scientists will share research results, develop and advance a coordinated research agenda for studying indoor microbial populations, and educate NGOs and key federal agencies about the importance of directing research and regulatory to this new field of inquiry.

This grant provides two years of continuing support to the Science Festival Foundation to produce the World Science Festival, a weeklong series of more than 50 lectures, demonstrations, and public exhibits designed to celebrate science and scientific discovery. In addition to funding the organization and production of the festival for the next two years, funds from this grant will also support the Science Festival Foundation's continued efforts to increase its impact by establishing national and international distribution networks for Festival-created content, to expand its online media platform, and to develop programming for use in science classrooms in New York and beyond.

This grant provides funds for the production of a 60 to 90 minute primetime documentary, Coming of Age in Aging America, to be broadcast nationally on PBS. The documentary will focus on the changing demographics of the U.S. and the challenges posed to American cultural, governmental, and other societal institutions by an aging U.S. populace. The documentary will devote considerable attention to issues of aging and work, including looking at the costs and benefits of working longer, the consequences of various retirement practices on the U.S. social security and Medicare systems, ageism and social biases affecting older workers, and new research on age and productivity.

Funds from this grant will provide support for a major conference on high-skilled immigration for both researchers and non-specialists. Organized by Stephen Merrill, Executive Director of the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy of that National Academy of Sciences, the conference will concentrate on international comparisons of policies that influence the supply, demand, and mobility of scientists and engineers. An expert committee appointed by STEP, will study this topic in advance of the conference and commission several review papers. Subsequent to the conference, the Academy will issue a peer-reviewed publication featuring feature conference session summaries, the commissioned papers, and a research agenda that can help prioritize future work in this area.

The decision to emigrate depends both on where the potential immigrant is going and where he or she is coming from. Changes in the conditions and laws in a given country affect people differently in different countries, depending on the conditions and laws there. Yet, when collecting information about immigration, countries tend to be interested only in their own policies, and they tend to track only the total immigrant flows across their own borders. No one nation has much incentive to collect, reconcile, or share detailed information about what is happening elsewhere. This grant to the International Migration Institute at Oxford University supports the work of a team lead by Hein de Haas to compile information about the flow patterns and the policy determinants of high-skilled immigration, concentrating on relocation decisions by students and academics. The project, called DEMIG, studies the "DEterminants of International MIGration" by producing sharable datasets that are bilateral and longitudinal, i.e., that record both sending and receiving information between pairs of countries repeatedly over time. Funds from this grant will allow de Hass and his team to extend DEMIG's Migration Flow Database to include skill indicators like education and employment, and extend DEMIG's Policy Database beyond immigration laws to track factors like fellowship or research funding levels that can specifically influence student and faculty mobility decisions.

Do immigrant workers crowd out native ones? How do specific changes in U.S. immigration policy affect scientific and engineering labor markets? Why do foreign-born students and workers who stay in the U.S. decide to stay? How do these considerations vary across scientific fields? This grants supports the work of professors John Bound and Sarah Turner to build well?specified, carefully estimated, and policy-relevant models of how the supply of and demand for scientists and engineers in the U.S. adjust in a global context. Within this comprehensive framework, they will investigate and quantify given factors such as U.S. immigration policies, economic conditions in foreign countries, and U.S. market conditions for tertiary education as these interact with observed factors such as wages, unemployment rates, and flows between specialties in domestic labor markets for scientists and engineers.

This grant provides three years of support for the continued operation of the Sloan Public Service Awards. Administered by the Fund for the City of New York since 1973 and supported by the Sloan Foundation since 1985, these annual awards honor exceptional civil servants working in New York City municipal government. Each of the six yearly winners receive a $10,000 award and is honored both in a ceremony at his or her workplace and in a city-wide celebration presided over by the Mayor. Grant funds will support the administrative costs of the program for three years, including the selection process, nominee vetting, press outreach, event planning, and award monies.