This grant provides funding for the Scientific Research Partnerships (SRP) program, an initiative at The Metropolitan Museum of Art that seeks to offer other museums, libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions access to expert scientific researchers and state-of-the-art instruments housed at The Met. The Met’s scientific activities are led by Marco Leona, the David H. Koch Scientist in Charge, who heads a small team focused on the science of art conservation. Anchored in material science and chemistry, conservation science applies contemporary imaging and analytic techniques to questions of the history of artistic practice. Research questions vary from project to project, with recent projects ranging from what might be learned from the coatings of Egyptian funerary objects to the discovery of a painted-over King Charles Cavalier Spaniel in one of Picasso’s early works.  The SRP works to build partnerships that put these scientific capabilities at the service of other institutions.  To date, the SRP network has 19 such partnerships, including with the New York Municipal Archives, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Pratt Institute. Grant funds will support one Associate Research Scientist and two Research Assistant positions, as well as maintenance fees for some of The Met’s scientific equipment. A particular focus for the next three years will be the expansion of partnerships to less-well-resourced institutions that engage with different communities across the city.

This grant provides continued support to the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY (the Center) for the Sloan Fellowship for Science Biography. Dedicated to biographers focusing on the lives of scientists or technological innovators, the fellowship includes a $72,000 stipend for the selected biographer, funds for a research assistant, and a year-long residency at the Center that includes frequent meetings, lectures, and workshops with other biographers. Fellowships are awarded by an independent committee of scientists and scholars, who in the past has included Center’s Executive Director Kai Bird, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus; Leslie Berlin, Project Historian for Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives; Harvard Professor and Charles Darwin biographer Janet Browne; physics historian Daniel Kevles; science biographer Nancy Greenspan; Princeton Professor and medical historian Keith Wailoo; and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes.

An emerging global community of several hundred researchers has started to build cells from scratch by combining small molecules, purified proteins, lipids, and synthetic DNA to assemble simple synthetic cells from scratch. While this community has developed a wide range of ‘modules’ that implement various cellular processes and functions, the fact that these modules are developed independently (in different laboratories) is creating obstacles to progress. For instance, modules are intended to operate within a synthetic cell fluid (cytosol) but their creation across independent laboratories means that they are not developed in a standardized cytosol. This often leads to incompatibilities whereby the conditions that optimize the chemical performance of one module render another either non-functional or poorly performing. This grant to Richard Murray, a Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and of Bioengineering at Caltech, and Akshay Maheshwari, co-founder and CEO of a company (b.next) “working to democratize synthetic cell engineering”, supports the continued development of Nucleus, a platform that provides a standardized suite of hardware components (chemicals / molecules) and procedures / recipes that can be used to build synthetic cells at varying levels of complexity. Murray and Maheshwari plan to develop three ‘modules’ that expand the technical capabilities of Nucleus, and to enclose the improved Nucleus cytosol within a lipid membrane to produce the first Nucleus synthetic cell. First, they will characterize the Nucleus cytosol performance (yield of transcription and translation) as a function of cytosol molecular composition, with the goal of identifying the molecular composition that best supports simultaneous operation of various modules. The Nucleus cytosol will be characterized across a wide range of various small molecule and protein concentrations, as well as under various conditions of RNA and ribosome abundance. They will also develop tools for implementing modules as ‘DNA constructs’, custom-designed DNA sequences that can be used to synthesize targeted proteins. Murray and Maheshwari will then develop three modules to improve the Nucleus cytosol. The first module aims to increases energy capacity by fostering energy recycling. The existing Nucleus cytosol uses certain energy-resource molecules that when metabolized produce toxins that accumulate and eventually poison the cytosol. The plan is to leverage a chemical pathway that uses a certain enzyme to regenerate the energy resource molecules from the toxins, thereby removing the toxins and replenishing energy resources.  The second module aims to control protein-expression through dynamic (time varying) control of protein abundance.  The existing Nucleus cytosol only allows for protein synthesis, with no ability to reduce protein abundance; a situation that amounts to a limitation on the ability to control the dynamics within a synthetic cell. The team will develop a module that uses a protein enzyme to continuously degrade targeted proteins and thereby provide temporal control over protein abundance. Lastly, the team will develop a ‘membrane-protein module’ and encapsulate the improved cytosol to create a Nucleus synthetic cell. The module will be used for inserting proteins into a synthetic cell lipid membrane; proteins that can transport nutrients into and waste out of a synthetic cell, as well as enable membrane-based cell-cell communication and implementation of various membrane-based molecular sensors. Finally, Murray and Maheshwari will encapsulate the improved membrane-module-enhanced cytosol and reoptimize the performance of the encapsulated cytosol to create a Nucleus synthetic cell. If successful, this project will lead to a novel, open-source platform for building synthetic cells that is accessed and further developed by the global synthetic cell community.

Compared with the United States, it is noticeably easier in Europe, Japan, and some other countries to get people or products from one place to another. Speculation about why is easy. Serious diagnoses and practical remedies are much harder since these should rely on models, data, and analysis. Recently organized to address such challenges, the Transportation Infrastructure Procurement and Financing Project (TIPFP) is a research effort based at NBER that is mobilizing a variety of experts, institutions, and approaches. TIPFP is laser-focused on the problem of transportation infrastructure. Roads, bridges, ports, and transit systems cost trillions of dollars annually and play a critical role both in the U.S. economy and in the world’s trading network. TIPFP leaders Ed Glaeser of Harvard and Jim Poterba of MIT plan to investigate three specific questions that have emerged as having the greatest promise and priority: Are we choosing the right transportation projects to fund? Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of some sort always accompanies such decisions, but it is often perfunctory and incomplete. Infrastructure projects require large up-front fixed costs and deliver benefits over long periods of time. So there can be significant uncertainty about the rate of return on new projects, not to mention sensitivity to assumed discount rates and long-term growth rates. These are, moreover, just complications when evaluating one project at a time. What people really care about is how well the whole transportation system performs. TIPFP will provide decision-makers with better tools, especially since one of the defining properties of infrastructure is that it is very hard to change once built. Why do such infrastructure projects cost so much? By many estimates, similar transportation projects are three times as expensive in the United States as in other countries. Costs also vary dramatically from one U.S. state to another, as do procurement processes, renegotiation procedures, and regulations of all sorts. TIPFP will systematically compile and compare data about all these variations to inform its analyses. One hypothesis to test is that “state capacity” really matters, i.e., the technocratic expertise that government officials can bring to bear when managing how construction contractors approach everything from auction bidding through project completion. How should we fund transportation infrastructure projects? Gasoline taxes currently contribute over $40 billion annually to the federal government’s Highway Trust Fund, for example. These contributions will dry up as Electric Vehicles (EVs) become more prevalent. Other sources have been proposed, but perhaps much more important is the possibility of also instituting new rules for determining how those new funds will be distributed. Current mechanisms for subsidizing projects provide poor incentives to control costs or maximize benefits. Again, TIPFP will compile and compare information about alternative allocation methods, including case studies from other countries for publication in a conference volume.

The Yale economist and 1981 Nobel laureate James Tobin is often quoted as saying, “The most important decisions a scholar makes are what problems to work on.”  Rather than trying to fill gaps in the literature, he continued, “The best economists have taken their subjects from the world around them.” On this view, perhaps academics seeking policy relevance need to reformulate and reframe the problems they work on with the real world more in mind?  That belief animates Tim Bresnahan, an economics professor emeritus at Stanford, and the team of other experts he leads.  Their goal is not just to inspire dozens more papers about the productivity (i.e., output per input) of the U.S. economy, but rather to inspire a new generation of researchers who study productivity questions in ways that are truly policy-relevant. Specifically, when legislation comes up that could enhance U.S. productivity or, for that matter, when legislation is proposed on nearly any topic, discussions in Congress that determine its fate depend far less on predicted consequences for the economy as a whole than on predicted consequences for the federal budget deficit.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a strictly nonpartisan and highly respected group of technocrats charged with “scoring” proposed bills in terms of their likely effect on federal revenues and expenditures. In contrast, academic economists are almost always concerned with policy impacts on growth, labor, equity, and the economy in general rather than on the budget deficit in particular.  The importance of CBO scoring has, to date, been largely ignored.  In concert with other offices like the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), these ratings are generated according to Congressionally mandated guidelines that—for the sake of consistency and practicality—oversimplify many issues.  They rarely, for example, consider any time frame longer than ten years!  CBO is not prohibited from also conducting more sophisticated analyses, but is severely constrained by a lack of evidence, models, and time.  Hence their recent appeal to academic researchers for help on specific topics that was published in the influential Journal of Economic Perspectives. Three of the challenges called out in the CBO’s “request for research” are estimating net returns on R&D investments, on immigration practices, and on permitting reforms.  In each case, the significant costs and benefits of particular policies are potentially much longer term than Congress usually takes into account.  These topics also intersect well with Sloan priorities: the ROI on research and development is a critical question in the economics of science; immigrant contributions are a critical factor in regional economic development; and construction permitting is a critical problem in creating transportation infrastructure. Over the next two years, this grant will support 24 early-career investigators working in these three areas as “NBER Productivity Fellows.”  They will benefit from mentoring, community engagement, connections with government officials and datasets, as well as, in the case of graduate students, modest stipends to free them from other obligations.  The grant will also fund a workshop in Washington for researchers and practitioners working on U.S. productivity enhancements in policy-relevant, technocratic, nonpartisan, and real-world ways.

Unraveling how mechanical forces / physical effects contribute to biological function is an underexplored yet important aspect of understanding living systems. This grant provides continuing support to a trio of early-career researchers at Rockefeller University for a series of experiments geared at understanding how mechanical force impacts two important biological functions: the copying of information stored in DNA (transcription) and the coordinated development of a field of cells into a multicellular functional unit (here, skeletal tissue). The proposed transcription research will study how force impacts the dynamics and fidelity of the primary biomolecular machine responsible for transcription, RNA polymerase (RNAP). Forces will be applied to RNAP either using laser tweezers or via collisions between RNAP and various biomolecules that mimic RNAP collisions in live cells. Fluorescence microscopy will capture RNAP dynamics and cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) will reveal how the molecular-scale structure, and therefore the biochemical activity, of RNAP is modified by collisions. The tissue development research will use cryo-EM along with cellular biology methods that stimulate cell contraction -and thus force propagation- to study changes in molecular architecture that are driven by supracellular (beyond a single cell) force transmission.

This grant provides three additional years of support to Barnard College to continue the partnership with Athena Film Festival to develop and celebrate films by and about women that focus on STEM themes and characters. Grant funds will support an annual showcase screening at the Athena Film Festival, followed by a panel discussion with scientists and filmmakers; four annual fellowships to support screenwriters with STEM-focused scripts who attend a lab and receive six months of mentorship; and a $20,000 annual Development Grant that goes to an Athena List finalist or winner with a STEM-themed script and which includes a public reading of the winning script that takes place during the festival.

This grant provides three years of renewed support to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for a series of activities, programs, and initiatives designed to encourage UCLA film students to engage with scientific and technological themes in their filmmaking and to produce science-themed films and screenplays. UCLA will award three annual prizes: a $30,000 production award and two $15,000 screenwriting awards for feature films or episodic television. UCLA will also host an annual colloquium that brings film students together with leading researchers to discuss the newest developments in science and technology. This grant also provides funds for dedicated scientific advisors to help students with their projects, independent judges to evaluate student submission, and faculty support and other operational and promotional costs associated with administration of the program.

This grant provides three additional years of support to continue the partnership with Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama (CMU) to award prizes to student screenwriters who write science or technology themed scripts. The CMU program includes a year-long screenwriting workshop that meets weekly and focuses on the challenges and opportunities posed by incorporating science into dramatic or comedic narratives; a mentorship program that pairs film students with working scientists to help them depict science accurately in their work; a guest speaker series by accomplished screenwriters and television writers; an annual screenwriting competition that awards $45,000 total per year to three to four of the best science-themed scripts submitted; and yearly showcases in Los Angeles and New York to bring student filmmakers into contact with leading producers, directors, and distributors in the film and television industry.

This grant provides support to the WGBH Educational Foundation for a one-hour NOVA documentary that will explore outer space as the new and rapidly expanding military frontier that has emerged as the world’s most essential warfighting domain. In addition to providing historical context going back to Sputnik, the documentary will explain how satellites are the foundation of the modern world, from GPS navigation and the internet to cell phones and traffic lights and from climate modeling and weather prediction to online banking and supply chains. NOVA will embed at the Space Force Command’s headquarters in Colorado Springs and will also be on hand to witness and report on the first military exercise in orbit planned for 2025. The show is scheduled for prime time in early 2026 and the Foundation would be the primary funder.