This grant provides partial support to the University of Alaska, Anchorage for activities designed to recruit and retain indigenous graduate students in STEM disciplines as part of the university's participation in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) . This is the second three-year grant to the University of Alaska fund these activities. Principal Investigator Herb Schroeder and his staff had considerable success during their first grant, recruiting 26 students compared to an expectation of 18. Attrition has also been low, with the Alaska programs having lost only one M.S. and one Ph.D. student so far. Schroeder expects to recruit seven new students annually over the next three years. Some of the activities supported through this grant include cross-cultural training for faculty and staff who work with native graduate students, weekly team meetings, a recitation session devoted to strengthening the academic skills need to successfully complete graduate work, and workshops for helping students with professional networking, grant writing, and serving as an effective teaching assistant.

Funds from this grant support the development, production, and broadcast of three science-and-technology-themed documentaries by the PBS series American Experience. The three proposed documentaries include: "The Poisoner's Handbook," based on Deborah Blum's Foundation-supported book about the birth of toxicology and forensic science in the Jazz Age and how new crime-fighting techniques led to improvements in safety; "Robert Noyce, the Integrated Circuit and the Birth of Silicon Valley," based on Leslie Berlin's The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, a formative tale about one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century that has received relatively little exposure in the mass media; and "The Grand Coulee Dam" about the damming of the Columbia River-at the time, the largest concrete structure ever built-which transformed the Pacific Northwest. In addition, American Experience is proposing two interactive games to accompany the broadcast of "The Poisoner's Handbook."