In 2009, the Foundation approved a grant to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to support its work helping the world's nuclear power plant vendors develop a voluntary Code of Conduct. The effort has made significant progress and funds from this grant support the Carnegie Endowment's continuing efforts to advance the project. The Code text now contains sections on safety, health and radiological protection, physical security, environmental protection and the handling of irradiated fuel and nuclear waste, compensation for nuclear damage, nonproliferation and safeguards, and ethics. Drawing, where possible, on existing international agreements and International Atomic Energy Agency recommendations, the Code would pledge complying vendors to a standard of behavior higher than would be expected in its absence or than has been true historically. While the Code, once agreed upon, will be voluntary, it promises to be highly significant in influencing the behavior of power plant vendors. Hopefully it will be incorporated into each company's own code of business conduct, making it essentially mandatory for them. Moreover, the Code's very public nature and the scrutiny of environmental and nonproliferation advocacy groups will help guarantee vendor compliance.

This grant provides continuing support to Columbia University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for three more years of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays and produce short films about science and technology. Activities supported through this grant include the provision of faculty mentors and science advisors for students working on science-themed film projects, two annual awards for production of short films on science and technology, two annual awards to develop promising feature film scripts with science content, and networking events with select film industry producers, agents, and managers.

This grant provides continuing support to Carnegie Mellon University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for three more years of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays about science and technology. Activities supported under this grant include a symposium featuring internationally recognized scientists and technologists discussing current work in their fields; two semesters of training in screenwriting, guest-faculty workshops by accomplished screenwriting mentors; consultations by scientists and technologists on scripts in progress; the presentation of two awards for outstanding student screenplays exploring scientific themes or featuring scientists or technologists as characters, and activities to promote student career advancement, including industry showcases in Los Angeles and New York.

This grant funds three years of the Sloan Science-in-Film initiative by the Sundance Institute, which runs the Sundance Film Festival, the premiere independent film festival in the U.S. Funds will support four annual components of the initiative: a commissioning grant, a feature film fellowship, a $20,000 best Science and Technology feature film prize, and a panel of filmmakers and scientists followed by an awards reception.

Swarthmore College is studying the migration of undergraduates into and out of STEM disciplines. In 2009 the Foundation supported efforts by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), the umbrella organization of 47 public, historically black universities, law schools and medical schools, to enable them to explore the possibility of some of their member campuses joining the Swarthmore-led STEM migration project or launching a similar project. Fund from this follow-on grant will enable 20 of the TMCF member campuses to join the Swarthmore-led project. The addition of 20 TMCF campuses to the STEM migration project would provide the basis for these campuses to improve STEM retention, provide a broader basis for each of the 44 campuses to compare its own performance with that of others, greatly expand the project's data on African American students, and facilitate further fundraising to sustain the project to which both Swarthmore College and TMCF are committed.

In February 2009 the Foundation funded a project by Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to enable them to develop a national strategy for enhancing the completion rate in STEM master's degrees. With these funds, CGS surveyed what was known about this subject, produced a paper that summarized what is known, outlined a research agenda for improving knowledge about what affects attrition and completion rates, and began laying out a taxonomy of STEM master's degrees. They also convened a meeting of researchers, graduate deans, and others to discuss the paper and what CGS could and should do further in this area. The strategy that emerged from this preliminary work calls for a two-phased follow-on program. The first phase, funding for which is provided through this grant, would (a) further develop a taxonomy of STEM master's programs; (b) establish standardized definitions for "entry", "attrition", and "completion" in STEM master's programs; (c) provide a first look at comparable completion and attrition rates within STEM master's programs in a variety of programs in a selected number of institutions; and (d) determine factors perceived to affect student success or attrition and identify promising practices to foster student success. Based on what is learned from all this, CGS will decide whether a second phase is warranted that would gather data on completion and attrition from a larger, more representative set of institutions and track implementation and effects of promising interventions designed to improve outcomes for all or a subset of STEM master's degree types.

One of the objectives of Sloan's Indoor Environment program is to support targets of opportunity that will help to advance research and knowledge about the indoor microbial environment. Funds from this grant support research on the indoor microbial environment by a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research plan has three objectives: 1) to investigate the processes of microbial community assembly in the indoor environment; 2) to obtain an understanding of the relationship between building design, external climate, and interior microbial community; and 3) to improve instrumentation to measure volatile, organic compounds derived from microbes, microbial toxins, and allergens in indoor air. The Berkeley team's project complements existing Foundation grants supporting the Biology and Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon, which is developing a predictive science of the built environment microbiome through partnerships between architects and biologists; a major ongoing research project to catalog the indoor microbial world at the University of Colorado at Boulder; a project to study New York City air and to develop a single cell genomics pipeline at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and efforts by the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole to examine the rare biosphere in drinking water.

This grant to the Science Festival Foundation will provide support for the planning, development, and production of the fourth World Science Festival , a five-day series of speakers, panels, exhibits and events hosted throughout New York City which aims to contribute to a shift in the public perception of science, making manifest how science is as indispensible to a rich life as other cultural mainstays like music, theatre, art, dance and literature. Grant funds will also support the Science Festival Foundation's implementation of the first phase of its three-year Strategic Plan and Business Development initiative, which aims to develop a revenue model to ensure the Festival's long-term sustainability and to expand the Festival's impact through various channels: including the use of live, digital, and broadcast platforms; national and international partnerships, and educational outreach.

David Wise, of the Kennedy School of Government and the National Bureau of Economic Research, has directed a remarkably successful program at NBER since 1985 on the Economics of Aging. He has now assembled a team of distinguished economists, including Stanford's John Shoven and Harvard's David Cutler, to expand this program's focus to include research on aging and work, by examining the conditions in public policy and in the workplace that make it difficult or costly for people to work longer than conventional retirement age. This grant supports four interrelated research projects. The first project develops tools for estimating how policy reforms would affect work at older ages and details two possible reforms: a "paid up" social security reform and a Medicare-as-first-payer reform, each of which could facilitate longer working lives. The second project analyzes relationships between firm policy provisions and work behavior at older ages, based on the diverse pension and retiree health plans of employees of Towers Watson client companies. The third project addresses the effect of improving health status on the ability to work at older ages and analyzes mortality reductions in 12 countries, emphasizing the rationale that these trends provide for facilitating longer working lives. The fourth project further develops an international perspective by exploring older workers' preferences for work arrangements and employers' willingness to accommodate such preferences in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

Unlike in the private sector, almost all state and local government workers-from employees of state agencies to public school teachers and policemen-participate in defined benefit pension plans. Not only do these plans strain public budgets, they generally incent early retirement by penalizing work at older ages. Funds from this grant will support a project by the Urban Institute to enhance knowledge and awareness of the work disincentives created by state and local defined benefit pension plans and of existing reform options that encourage public?sector employees to work longer. Under the direction of Richard Johnson and Eugene Steuerle, this project will accomplish several objectives over the course of three stages of work. The first stage of the project will quantify work disincentives in state and local defined benefit pension plans, compare disincentives across states and localities and across occupations, and identify existing reforms that have reduced work disincentives. The second stage of the project will match these disincentive measures to state and local workers in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and model their impact on work and retirement decisions. The final stage will follow state and local retirees over time in the SIPP and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to measure their economic status and the share who return to work, either in the public or private sector. Ultimately, this project will enrich our understanding of how defined benefit pension plans discourage work at older ages and identify reforms that do or potentially could encourage later retirement.