Funds from this grant will support the development and administration of a fellowship program aimed at encouraging young economists to work on understudied or poorly understood issues at the intersection of aging and work. Over the course of five years, eleven two-year fellowships will be awarded, providing a stipend and tuition support to qualified pre-doctoral students interested in studying the economics of labor market activity by older workers in the U.S. The fellowships will be administered by David Card, a leading labor economist and program director of NBER's Labor Studies Program.

Funded by the National Institute on Aging, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is a nationally representative panel study of Americans over the age of 50 and their spouses. Respondents are interviewed every two years. The core survey collects information on income and wealth, employment, pension plans and health insurance, physical health and functioning, cognition, expectations, preferences, demographics, family structure, and some biomarkers. Supplemental surveys of subsets of the respondents cover more extensive biological, cognitive, and genetic measures; consumption, education, and human capital; information technology use; prescription drug use; happiness and well being; and education and human capital expenditures. This grant will fund a project by a team of researchers led by Maggie Levenstein of the Michigan Census Research Data Center to link HRS data to the U.S. Business Register, a list of business establishments in the U.S. compiled and maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau. Successfully linking these two datasets will greatly increase the potential usefulness of the HRS, allowing researchers to measure how various health and wellness markers of older workers vary and correlate with the characteristics of the firms that employ them and opening new research possibilities in economics, psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, and demography. In addition to the work required to link the two datasets, funds will support the creation and dissemination of a publicly-available version of the new, linked dataset (suitably anonymized to protect the privacy of survey respondents), a series of papers conducting preliminary analysis of the data, and a conference to promote the new dataset and its use.

Men and women nearing retirement often experience multiple family obligations-to aging parents, to spouses, to adult children, and to young grandchildren-yet there is little research on how these obligations affect the labor market activities of older Americans. This grant aims to address this gap in our understanding by supporting work by Dr. Suzanne Bianchi of UCLA and Dr. Emily Weimers of the University of Michigan to study how family obligations affect the labor market behavior of older workers. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a nationally representative longitudinal sample of over 18,000 individuals from 5,000 families across the U.S., Bianchi and Weimers will address the following questions: 1. How does the need for or the need for financial support-of parents,spouses, adult children, and grandchildren-affect current labor force behavior (including labor force participation and hours worked) of men and women in late middle ages and early older ages? Is there any variance across cohorts? 2. Do people with considerable demands from family stop working or work less, or do people who have always worked less care more for family members?

A large fraction of American Indian students begin their college careers at one of the thirty-three accredited Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). These institutions, most of which are associated with a particular tribe or set of tribes, are relatively new. Although most still provide only two-year degrees and certificates, others now offer a growing variety of four-year degrees and some offer master's degrees. Because of the important role of the TCUs in the education of Indian students, including those who major in STEM disciplines and go on to graduate work, it is important that these institutions' STEM faculty be capable of excellent teaching and guiding student research. Currently, approximately 28% of the 152 STEM faculty at TCUs have bachelor's degrees, 40% have master's degrees or are Ph.D. candidates, and 22% have doctorate degrees. An ongoing program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides scholarships to TCU faculty who are within one year of finishing their Ph.D. degrees with the understanding that these faculty would remain at their TCU institution for at least two years after earning their degree. Though the Mellon program has been successful in encouraging TCU faculty to finish graduate work (18 of 20 supported students have completed their Ph.D.) the supported faculty have largely come from fields outside science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with only two of the twenty supported fellows coming from STEM fields. Funds from this grant will provide monies to expand and supplement Mellon's successful program, administered by the American Indian College Fund, to more aggressively recruit and support faculty from STEM disciplines.

Funds from this grant provide support for a one-hour documentary, to be produced and broadcast by the influential PBS documentary series Frontline, about the repercussions of Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident caused by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan. Starting with an analysis of what went wrong at Fukushima, the program will track the still-developing story and critically evaluate the implications for U.S. nuclear safety and for the future of nuclear energy in the U.S. Using a mixture of archival footage, location shooting in the U.S., Japan, and China, interviews with scientific and technical experts, politicians, policymakers and citizens, the documentary will seek to present a measured, fair, and factually-based analysis of one of the many major policy choices of our time. To ensure accuracy, the production team will draw on a scientific board of advisors who will provide expert guidance and information.

Funds from this grant support two programs at the City University of New York aimed at supporting faculty and students in STEM disciplines. The first, CUNY's Summer Research Program, provides interested undergraduates with the opportunity to engage in hands-on, in-the-lab science, assisting CUNY science faculty with ongoing research projects during the summer. Grant funds will support 10 students in each of 2012, 2013, and 2014, providing a housing allowance and a living stipend. The second supported program under this grant is CUNY's Junior Faculty Fellowship Program, which aims to support promising early-career STEM faculty at CUNY by providing a $50,000 fellowship for use in research. Over the course of the next three years, eight faculty will receive fellowships through this grant.

This grant provides funds for a project by George Mason University to facilitate use of District Builder, a free, open-source software platform that allows citizens to draw, share, and submit their own congressional redistricting maps, in New York State. Partnering with New York's Fordham University, the George Mason team will further develop and improve the District Builder platform, populate it with relevant demographic and legal data specific to New York, launch and maintain a public website to host the District Builder platform aimed at New York residents, and engage in a series of educational and outreach initiatives, including a Fordham-sponsored competition that will encourage students to submit redistricting maps drawn using District Builder and have their submissions ranked against a set of objective, measurable criteria, with the winning map to be submitted to the New York State legislature for consideration in its redistricting decisions.