Babies are born sterile. The microbial ecosystem that thrives on and inside each of us-stomach bacteria that help us digest food, for instance-are acquired post-birth, presumably through contact with our mothers. But what of babies born prematurely, separated from their mothers, and treated in sterile neonatal intensive care units? How do these infants acquire the microbes needed to survive outside the womb? This grant supports the research of UC, Berkeley professor Jill Banfield, who is investigating this very question. In a one-year pilot study with collaborator Dr. Michael Morowitz of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Banfield will examine the microbial profiles of the air, water, and surfaces of a neonatal intensive care unit and compare the profiles to those found in the gut of three premature infants staying in the ICU. Using modern molecular tools, the research team will analyze the microbial profiles of the neonatal intensive care unit environments over time and space to potentially identify the sources of microbes involved in infant gut colonization.

Funds from this three-year grant will support activities by Film Independent to develop science-themed film scripts and assist production teams developing science-themed feature films. Grant funds will primarily support two ongoing programs at Film Independent: the Sloan Producer's Grant program, which chooses one science script each year and develops it through a seven-week course of mentorship so that the project emerges with a realistic budget, schedule, and business plan; and the Fast Track program, which chooses exceptional science-themed film projects that are ready for financing and exposes them to more than 60 film financiers, production companies, and other industry professionals during an intensive series of meetings held at the Los Angeles Film festival. Also supported through this grant is an annual reception hosted by Film Independent at the Filmmaker Forum of the Director's Guild of America, where Sloan supported writers and directors are given special exposure to some 400 influential filmmakers and industry professionals.

Funds from this grant support a project by Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley Law School to develop practical solutions to the obstacles copyright law places in the way of the implementation of digital library initiatives. Samuelson and her research team will address several thorny issues, including orphan works, private ordering, collective licensing, digital lending, and metadata ownership, in an effort to develop fair and practical procedures for the successful implementation of library initiatives that seek to realize the full potential of digital libraries. Over two years, funds from this grant will support several white papers, workshops and conferences, and the crafting of model legislation. The work of Samuelson's team will also help inform the continued development of the Foundation-supported Digital Public Library of America.

One of the objectives of our small program focusing on student retention in STEM disciplines at the undergraduate and graduate levels is to encourage universities to obtain and pay attention to data on the migration of their own students into and out of STEM disciplines. In the absence of such data, which most universities do not have, many campuses are either unaware of or ignore high net out-migration of students from their STEM departments. The result is wasted resources, underutilized faculty and facilities, and, depending on why students leave these disciplines, disappointed educational aspirations. Funds from this grant support a project by the American Society for Engineering Education to collect and report data on completion rates and time-to-degree in undergraduate engineering programs. Initial data collection will begin in the summer of 2012 with ASEE inviting all 380 U.S. engineering schools to participate. Data will be published in aggregate form, reporting separately on public and private institutions; schools that accept students as freshmen, sophomores, or juniors; and transfer and non-transfer students. The collected information will provide a rich dataset for scholarly analysis of student flows into and out of engineering.

This two-year grant to Yale University provides support to Professors Bill Nazaroff and Jordan Peccia to continue their ongoing work characterizing airborne microbial populations of indoor environments. The team will study the size distributions of bioaerosols from the indoor environment under occupied and unoccupied conditions. They will examine the sources, origins, and population characteristics of airborne bacteria and fungi in indoor settings that are attributable to human occupancy and collect and analyze air and dust samples from 10 different indoor environments-all elementary schools in the U.S., Germany, and China. Collected samples will help shed light on how airborne bacteria and fungi differ from other airborne particulate matter, how internal physical processes in indoor environments shape bacterial and fungal size distributions, and the role human occupants play in shaping microbial populations in indoor air.

This two-year grant will support an ambitious research agenda spearheaded by Dr. Keith Seifert of the University of Ottowa, and Dr. Robert Samson of the Dutch Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures to use advanced DNA sequencing technology to further advance our understanding of fungi and the role they play in the microbial ecosystems of indoor environments. Supported activities include the analysis of more than 6,000 new fungal cultures to provide detailed DNA sequence and taxonomic information, which Seifert and Samson expect to result in the discovery of 50 to 100 new species of fungi. In addition, Seifert and Samson will conduct further research on identifying regions of fungal DNA that can be appropriately used for species identification, as the current DNA region used for identification is effective in distinguishing only 72% of known fungal species. Funds from this grant will also support the education and training of one graduate student and two postdoctoral fellows.

Different parts of the body have different microbial profiles. The microorganisms that thrive in our underarms are different from those that live on our hands, which are different, in turn, from those that live on our scalp. Funds from this grant support a project by the University of Chicago's Jack Gilbert to investigate how these unique microbial profiles interact with the microbial populations of surfaces in the indoor environment. Gilbert will examine the microbial profiles associated with the dominant hand, the gut, and heel pad from 20 individuals in 10 homes. He will then compare these profiles to those found on door knobs, kitchen surfaces, bedroom and bathroom floors, and light switches following a move into a new home. These profiles will be examined every day for two weeks prior to moving and four weeks after moving to a new home, shedding light on whether the microbes found on people are transferred to the surfaces of their homes and, if so, whether the transferred microbes thrive in the new environments they find themselves in.

The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) acts as the Foundation's agent in administering the Sloan Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. NACME receives applications from eligible students, awards Sloan scholarships, sends checks to students, receives and monitors students' reports on their spending and their academic progress, interacts regularly with the faculty who are key to our programs' success, disburses funds to participating university campuses and departments to help them with recruitment and retention activities, monitors the spending of these funds, maintains the database for these Foundation programs, and performs analysis of these data. This grant to NACME funds the administrative costs associated with these activities for the next three years.

Made in recognition of the International Year of Chemistry, this grant supports a year-long slate of activities planned by the Chemical Heritage Society (CHS) to inspire and educate the public about the critical role of chemistry and chemists in contemporary society and to increase public understanding of the role of women and minority women in chemistry. Activities supported under this grant include the recording, transcription, and editing of ten interviews with women chemists, the production of seven 12-to-15 minute web profiles of women in chemistry to be distributed online through the Chemical Heritage Society's website, and the inclusion of an additional section to the CHS website dedicated to the Women in Chemistry product. Additional funds are provided to allow CHS to develop and implement an outreach strategy to disseminate these new online materials widely through social media.

In a recent study, three out of four workers aged 50 or over, and who have never retired, report that they intend to work during retirement. Given the increasing presence of older workers, employers will be well-served to identify talent management strategies for maximizing the engagement and productivity of these workers. One way to maximize engagement and productivity is through providing employees with more autonomy over when, how, and where they work through the implementation of time and place management policies. This grant to the Boston College Center on Aging and Work supports a three-year research project to analyze the effects of such policies. The Boston College research team will partner with up to six major U.S. employers with labor forces larger than 10,000 employees to study the effects of implementing time and place management policies. The team will study the costs and benefits of such programs both for employers and employees, shedding light on how time and place management policies effect such metrics as worker productivity, absenteeism, turnover, and employee job satisfaction. The research has the potential to have wide-reaching impact as employers search for solutions on how to meet the diverse needs of an aging U.S. workforce.