The transition from high school to college can be daunting for many students, especially those who come from less-privileged backgrounds. One approach to supporting students through that transition is the introduction of college-level coursework (with credit) while still in high school. The Bard Early Colleges (BEC) are a unique instance of this approach in NYC, going beyond individual college courses to build a network of public high schools in which students complete high school graduation requirements by the end of sophomore year and are considered full-time undergraduate students in their 11th and 12th grades. BEC currently enrolls 1,600 NYC public school students across its four campuses in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Each is a public schools, governed by an agreement between Bard College and the NY Department of Education. Across the larger BEC network, 77% of high schoolers are students of color and 73% are classified by their districts as low-income; 60% are first-generation college students and, by the end of their time at BEC, roughly 80% of students receive a two-year Bard College Associate in Arts degrees, including 60 transferable Bard College credits. While the Queens and Manhattan campuses are well-established, the BEC Bronx and Brooklyn campuses are in a “startup phase,” with plans to enroll a new class of students each year until they reach full capacity by 2028. Before reaching full enrollment, these campuses rely on philanthropic support to build capacity for new initiatives that prepare students for a fulfilling and supportive college experience. Funds from this grant will  support the buildout of a new science laboratory on the Bronx campus, enabling Bard faculty in the sciences (across biology, physics and chemistry) to design and develop new biotechnology-based elective courses utilizing specialized equipment such as PCR machines, gel electrophoresis apparatus, centrifuges, micropipettes, incubators and spectrophotometers. Approximately half of grant funds will go to laboratory equipment procurement, and the other half dedicated to staffing, the design of new curriculum, and paid student research experiences.

What should urban transportation systems be trying to achieve? Most government officials have one goal only, which is to reduce congestion. They rely on engineering models and passenger tallies to estimate the immediate effects of a policy change—without necessarily taking into account all the behavioral adjustments that might eventually occur. And so additional highway lanes quickly fill up again due to “induced demand.” The total number of rides per day may increase, for example, but who rides is hardly ever mentioned. What would a more comprehensive approach look like? Economists often find it useful to imagine an ideal social planner. Specifically, how would such a czar set public transportation prices, offerings, and fleet sizes so that—when everyone from commuters to ride-share companies make their own best decisions—the resulting trips and trip durations maximize society’s total welfare after netting out costs of all kinds including externalities due to environmental damage, etc.? Even if it seems like a tall order, economists who study industrial organization naturally think about transportation in terms of spatial equilibrium models like this. Under the leadership of Milena Almagro, the researchers have been particularly successful so far at compiling and combining remarkable datasets. These include cell phone records from entire metropolitan areas. Besides travel routes and durations, they are also inferring information about travelers’ home and work locations, income, and other demographic details as well as estimates of environmental impacts, equity considerations, and other externalities. Based on such models and datasets, the team will dive into four deep research questions. They aim to characterize: 1) Optimal mixes of transportation modes, pricing strategies, and service levels; 2) Where expanding public transportation makes sense and where it does not; 3) The potential role of public transport that is “on-demand” rather than scheduled; 4) Gains due to transportation policy coordination across geographical jurisdictions. All will require the analysis of counterfactual scenarios, cross-subsidies, and other methodological challenges that this team is ready to overcome.

This grant continues support for an ongoing partnership at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) to commission, develop, and produce science and technology-themed plays. Over the next three years, MTC will commission nine new plays by both rising and established playwrights that explore scientific themes or include scientists, engineers, inventors, or mathematicians as major characters. Commissions are selected in consultation with an independent scientific advisory panel that serves as a year-round resource to help playwrights ensure scientific accuracy. In addition to the commissions, MTC will provide dramaturgical support, including readings and workshops, to both Sloan-commissioned writers and non-commissioned writers working on science-themed scripts, present a Sloan-commissioned work annually to the public as part of its Ted Snowdon Reading Series, and host an annual event that features three 20-minute staged excerpts from three prominent Sloan-commissions, followed by a panel discussion with scientists and playwrights.

Inside Climate News (ICN), the oldest and most dedicated climate newsroom in the country, is requesting three years of funding to support one full-time journalist dedicated to local reporting in New York City focused on climate change and environmental issues. While several news media outlets take a national and global approach to climate coverage, ICN’s goal is to instead show the growing day-to-day impact of climate change on New York City. ICN estimates that the new NYC climate journalist will publish 25-40 stories a year. The beat will include topics such as the city’s natural environment; how the impact of climate change on biodiversity can be mitigated; strategies to adapt to climate impacts such as sea level rise, storm surge and heat; mitigation strategies to reduce New York City’s emissions from transport, buildings and other sectors; environmental injustice and marginalized neighborhoods; clean energy job creation; and holding policymakers and power brokers accountable for environmental impacts.

The information stored in genes plays a huge role in directing the cellular processes underlying life, but stored information alone is inadequate to explain how cells function. Cellular forces and associated motions also play a decisive role in determining whether and when genetic information is expressed because DNA can only be copied when a chromosome is in its decompacted state and because forces and other cellular dynamics drive the transition between compacted and decompacted chromosome states. Forces are also central to the creation and migration of chromosomal density fluctuations, pockets of compaction in a nominally decompacted chromosome region (or of decompaction in a compacted region). These migrating density fluctuations can, in different scenarios, contribute both to biological function and to disfunction. Funds from this grant support Andrew Spakowitz, a Professor of Chemical Engineering and of Materials Science & Engineering at Stanford University, to develop theoretical models that will advance our understanding of how forces/dynamics impact the organization and function of chromosomes in eukaryotic cells. Spakowitz plans to achieve a multi-scale model via a staged progression of model development that describes the coupled chemical/mechanical dynamics starting at the molecular scale, he will then expand to intermediate-scale chromosome dynamics (about a tenth of a chromosome), and end with an exploration of dynamics at the scale of an entire chromosome or group of chromosomes. Forces to be modeled include constraining forces that arise from chemical bond formation between two typically distant segments of a chromosome that happen to come into proximity owing to the wiggling motion of a chromosome in the aqueous environment of a cell and which, in turn, promote chromosome compaction; thermal agitation forces (owing to collisions with water molecules) that drive chromosome decompaction; and the force exerted on DNA (by RNA polymerase) during transcription (reading of genetic information).  if successful, the project will improve our understanding of how coupled mechanical and chemical interactions at the molecular-scale drive the organizational dynamics observed at the much larger length scale of a chromosome or group of chromosomes, thereby providing insight into how forces mediate access to and use of genetically encoded information.

Suppose you want to address the critical shortage of caregivers for children. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, childcare workers currently earn hourly wages ($14.22 on average) that are even lower than those of pet caretakers or parking attendants (over $15 each). So part of almost any strategy would be to increase their salaries. But by how much? To formulate an appropriate policy, you would want to know more about the market for childcare workers—especially about the responsiveness of labor supply to changes in wage rates. To measure such responsiveness, economists like to talk about “elasticity.” Formally, it is the percentage change of one variable per percent change in the other. Assuming, for simplicity, that the labor supply curve looks like a line as a function of wage rate, it is easy to compute the elasticity we need from the slope of that line. And to determine that slope, all we need are two points on the line. One of those can be the current market equilibrium, i.e., where supply equals demand. In fact, the only points you ever get to observe are where the supply curve and the demand curve intersect. So to find a second point on the line, you would have to look for a situation that causes employers’ demand for childcare workers to shift. The big problem, though, is that anything that shifts demand is likely to shift supply as well. Then the new equilibrium will not even lie on the original line whose slope you wanted to find. The upshot is that elasticities, though marvelously useful, can be devilishly hard to estimate. That is why, facing proposed legislation it must evaluate, the Congressional Budget Office specifically published a call to researchers for help with estimating the elasticity of labor supply among childcare workers. Aaron Sojourner is stepping up to meet this challenge. Sojourner is organizing three different teams, methods, and data sources that will each help estimate elasticities in different settings he has identified where demand has shifted without necessarily changing the supply curve by much. These include places where: 1) a large new plant or facility opened that attracts jobseekers who were previously minding their children at home instead; 2) a state (e.g., New York or Massachusetts) offered extra COVID relief funds to childcare facilities with more than a certain number of caregivers; 3) a state or city (e.g., New York) rolled out universal Pre-Kindergarten programs that must be staffed quickly. The labor market in each such setting has its own intricacies, interactions, and idiosyncrasies—such as job requirements and quality—that the research teams will also take into account. But the three studies, taken together, will provide much better and more useful estimates of how the supply of caregivers responds to wage changes.  As the saying goes, “Economists agree on everything but the elasticities.” Empirical evidence about those numbers in the context of caregiving is precisely what this project will supply.

Building a simple form of cellular life from scratch is an ambitious goal, and working towards that goal will advance our understanding of living systems. One promising strategy to achieve this goal is based on the intuition that by avoiding the highly evolved and complex biomolecules found in present day cells, it should be possible to build a (proto)cell that’s much simpler than a natural cell. Professor Katarzyna (Kate) Adamala, an Assistant Professor of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development at the University of Minnesota, takes a different view. She’s open to using any molecules at her disposal to build life from scratch, and her approach to circumventing the complexity of modern cells is -somewhat paradoxically- to dive into molecular complexity. Her thinking is that it should be possible to engineer a complex, multifunctional protein that does what natural cells use several proteins to achieve. If she’s right, then what’s achieved by a complex network of chemical reactions in a natural cell could be achieved by a much simpler set of reactions in a synthetic cell that leverages more complex proteins. This grant supports Professor Adamala’s work aimed at circumventing the complexity of the chemical networks found in present-day cells by engineering more complex proteins. Natural cells are limited to building a tiny fraction of all possible proteins; primarily because they’re restricted to using a small fraction (22) of the known amino acids (~500). Adamala will study what limits which amino acids natural cells use to build proteins, circumvent those limits, and engineer a protein synthesis system -and an associated synthetic cell- that can build a wider range of proteins than can be built by natural cells. Adamala and her team plan to learn about the limitations of natural protein synthesis and expand the chemical diversity of translation via three activities. First, they will evolve the standard ribosome so that it’s capable of building proteins from noncanonical amino acids (ncAAs), amino acids other than the 22 used by natural cells. Second, they will engineer a modified version of a certain protein that’s known to ‘rescue’ failed protein translation. The modified protein will be able to rescue stalled translation involving noncanonical amino acids. Third, the researchers will engineer an RNA translation system that incorporates up to 20 ncAAs. Adamala and her colleagues will use these three products to create a synthetic cell -a liposome vesicle encapsulating “cytoplasm”--that is capable of expanded translation.

The ocean is the world’s largest carbon sink, absorbing approximately 30% of anthropogenic carbon emissions. As more carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean, the ocean becomes more acidic and less able to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A growing number of scholars are investigating a process called Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE), whereby alkaline (basic) natural substances, such as pulverized and calcium-rich rocks, are released into the ocean to increase the capacity for further carbon dioxide absorption. OAE is one of the main approaches among a larger portfolio of technologies and interventions know as marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR). mCDR is a nascent and growing field, with numerous technologies being studied and pilot-tested for deployment. Questions remain, however, about the technical feasibility and societal acceptance of mCDR interventions. At this early juncture, understanding community perspectives on OAE and mCDR technologies is critical. This grant funds a collaboration led by Sara Nawaz, Director of Research at the Institute for Carbon Removal at American University and Alicia Karspeck, founder and Chief Technology Officer at [C]Worthy, a Focused Research Organization.  Together, they plan to conduct a series of in-depth community engagement activities around two upcoming OAE field trials, one in the San Francisco Bay Area in California and the other off the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.  Grant funds will support Nawaz, Karspeck, and their team of two early-career scholars to engage stakeholders in each region to better understand public attitudes towards OAE and mCDR. The team will establish Community Advisory Boards consisting of participants from local environmental non-governmental organizations, Tribal communities, industry associations, port authorities, and local government representatives who can engage a broad swath of community stakeholders. In each locale, the team will organize two workshops to surface community concerns, address questions related to the OAE field trials and discuss priorities for how mCDR might impact these regions. In addition to providing information on OAE and mCDR approaches, the workshops will feature interactive scenario exercises designed to prompt deliberations about the future of larger scale mCDR. In addition to generating scholarly outputs, the team plans to publish a “Community Priorities on mCDR” document for each study region and will produce a toolkit for other researchers looking to recreate this in-depth model of community engaged research. The team will also develop and share insights about how social scientists can effectively engage with Focused Research Organizations in community-engaged research.

This grant to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) provides funding to transfer the organization’s core cultural aggregation effort—which includes the curation of more than 50 million digital objects from 6,000 libraries and archives nationwide—to the Free Library of Philadelphia. Grant funds will permit DPLA to migrate its entire collection, including all related metadata, to the Free Library, while continuing to preserve, manage and grow the collection over the next two years. Planned expenditures include outlays for data migration, technical integration into the Free Library’s existing systems, quality assurance, and staffing. Additional funds will support a strategic planning process in 2025 aimed at developing roadmap for the future of DPLA after the transition is completed.

This grant supports an effort by the University of Southern California Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice (CERPP)—in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and EducationCounsel—to develop an equity-minded, law-attentive organizational learning series. The series will support institutions of higher education as they continue to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in their respective communities in light of evolving legal and policy environments. Project activities center on three key components. First, the team will create 8-10 educational videos (10-15 minutes in length) that provide digestible summaries of key legal, policy, and research concepts pertaining to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in legally sustainable ways. Second, the team will host a webinar series featuring a robust, interactive curriculum for teams of campus stakeholders to engage in shared learning, facilitated dialogue, and action planning on program design. While this webinar series will be live and interactive, key content will be recorded and made available as on-demand resources. Third, the project will convene 5-7 teams of campus stakeholders, including legal counsel, senior leadership (i.e., provost), and other policymaking and decision-making positions (i.e., deans) to address a specific problem of practice. Participants will be offered additional technical assistance following the convening, including correspondence and consultations with experts who can provide insight on equity-minded, law-attentive practice, managing the change process, and interpreting data/research. The project promises to provide both high-level information and hands-on engagement to help educators effectively navigate the increasingly challenging legal and policy landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.