The American Council on Education (ACE) has successfully partnered with Sloan since 2003 in developing and administering the Sloan Faculty Career Flexibility Awards. Three rounds of the awards program have been completed, including awards focused on research universities, large master's universities, and liberal arts colleges. ACE proposes three main activities with this grant: pilot work with nine institutions of higher education in three types of institutions of higher education (three research, three large master's, and three liberal arts colleges) to understand further what they are doing for faculty pre- and post-retirement; an invitational conference that will involve teams comprised of administrators and faculty from the participating colleges and universities; and a new awards program to identify and recognize best practices regarding the culminating stages of faculty careers that meet the needs of both the institutions and the faculty members. Five winners in each of the three categories will be awarded $100,000 in recognition of their innovative efforts to provide effective faculty retirement practices.

For faculty at U.S. colleges and universities, transitioning into retirement often involves the daunting challenge of effectively reconfiguring their lives after decades of pursuing absorbing careers in which their identities are synonymous with their work. This grant to the University of California, Berkeley aims at helping institutions provide the (non-financial) policies, practices, and programs that will facilitate the retirement transition for faculty and serve the goals and needs of both the retiring faculty and the mission of the institution. Funded activities include support for two studies: the first descriptive, the second causal. The descriptive study will examine a diverse range of aging-related issues, including professional activities and productivity, career experiences, retirement and post-retirement career plans, and family relations. The causal study will collect and analyze data from the naturally occurring experimental conditions that arose from the three waves of the University of California Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Programs of the early 1990s. Outcome from this research promises to be applicable far outside the University of California system, and interest from university and college administrators has been significant.

The Science Friday Initiative requests three more years of support for Ira Flatow's award-winning radio program Science Friday and for its Sloan-initiated science-and-arts strand. Science Friday continues to be the most reliable two hours of radio broadcast-and increasingly, of podcast-time dedicated to talking intelligently about all things science in the United States. The show airs 52 weeks a year on over 300 stations through National Public Radio, reaching 1.3 million weekly listeners, and was downloaded in podcast form over 13 million times last year. This grant includes support for 12 segments a year on science and the arts plus support for the SciArts website, a portal that is reachable from the program's home page. Science Friday is an invaluable asset to Sloan's radio program and to the science community as a whole.

The website InsideSchools.org provides independent information about New York City schools and the New York City Department of Education, providing helpful information to parents trying to navigate the public school bureaucracy, journalists writing about education, social workers trying to place students in appropriate schools, and teachers looking for jobs. Funds from this grant support InsideSchools in its continuing efforts to compile accurate, professional, and current reviews of the more than 1,500 New York City public schools.

In recent years, programs to indentify and nurture talent in science and mathematics among NYC schoolchildren have largely disappeared. Funds from this grant will support The Courant Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU) in its efforts to launch a new Center for Mathematical Talent (CMT) to address precisely this problem. Courant is one of the premier mathematical institutions in the world, and can build on its established record of success with gifted and talented schoolchildren. Outreach for the new Center will specifically target women, underrepresented minorities, and disadvantaged students who may not otherwise know about or pursue opportunities to develop their potential.

Funds from this grant will support activities by Purdue University to recruit qualified, eligible Native American students for enrollment in graduate study in science or engineering, as well as a variety of activities designed to help meet the challenges facing Native students pursuing graduate work. Supported activities include recruitment trips by Purdue faculty to schools with Native students studying science and engineering as undergraduates, visits by prospective students to Purdue, design and production of print and web-based outreach materials, an annual retreat for enrolled students, regular mentoring for Native students, and coursework about successfully integrating the demands of graduate study with the demands of membership in a tribal community.