This grant to the WGBH Educational Foundation provides development funds for a screenplay about physicist Lise Meitner, who, with Otto Hahn, did the critical research leading to the discovery of nuclear fission, but who was excluded from the Nobel Prize that went to Hahn. Funds will go towards hiring a professional screenwriter to work with the director on the project and for a financing package that will enable a theatrical release and television broadcast on PBS's NOVA.

This grant provides support to the Coolidge Corner Theater, regularly voted the best movie theater in Boston and boasting a national reputation, as it continues its pioneering Science on Screen series and expands the series to movie theaters across the country. The Science on Screen series is notable because-in addition to screening traditional Sloan-style science films like Primer, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Brief History of Time-it takes non-scientific movies like American Beauty, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fight Club and shines a serious scientific lens on major themes in these films, following each showing with in-depth discussions led by working scientists. At the Arthouse Convergence, a major meeting of Art House theater professionals held in advance of the Sundance Film Festival, Coolidge plans to make a formal presentation and hold a Science on Screen workshop, distributing the syllabus, showcasing videos of speakers, discussing programming ideas, and exploring potential marketing and audience development tactics. This effort is an experiment that seeks to build on build on Coolidge's existing successes and scale them up in a meaningful way.

This grant provides support to the The Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF), for continued development of its activities in the Sloan Film program. HIFF activities consist of a $25,000 annual feature film prize with multiple screenings, a panel with filmmakers and scientists, a reception, and an intensive screenwriting workshop with staged readings of works-in-progress at the festival. Previous Foundation support of HIFF has resulted in an impressive roster of Sloan-winning films and directors, including Darren Aronofsky, Julian Schnabel, Michael Apted, Bill Condon and Marc Abraham, all of whom participated-in person, on video or via letter-at the festival's tenth anniversary tribute to the accomplishments of the Sloan partnership in 2009. Funds from this grant will ensure continuation of this successful partnership through the next three years.

One of the objectives of the Foundation's Indoor Environment (IE) program is to establish a multi-disciplinary network of researchers and practitioners that will build the community and organize specialized workshops, annual meetings of grantees, and a capstone event. This grant will fund noted evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen and colleagues at the University of California, in collaboration with Hal Levin, a prominent building sciences expert, in their efforts to create the microbiomes of Built Environments network (microBEnet). The team plans to make use of diverse web-based, web-enabled, and in-person strategies to build a vibrant online and real community. Over the next three years, microBEnet will conduct activities in three areas: among existing Foundation grantees, with researchers in related disciplines, and with a broader public and scientific community. Among current Sloan grantees, the network will organize annual meetings and develop a wiki for communication. With researchers in related disciplines, microBEnet will organize special sessions at high profile meetings, and develop web communication resources.

Funds from this grant support a pilot project by Michael Schwarz of Kikim Media to produce and distribute six short web videos to accompany new scientific papers that appear in the Public Library of Science. The proposed videos-each five to seven minutes long-aim to translate the latest scientific findings into a broadly accessible language that can reach a wider audience than those who currently read academic science journals.

By the mid-1980s, a century-old trend toward earlier labor force withdrawal by older American men came to a halt and subsequently reversed itself. At the same time, a shorter trend of flat labor force participation rates for older women stopped and their labor force participation rates began increasing. As a result, on average, older American men and women are now working longer and retiring later. Funds from this grant support a project by The Brookings Institution to estimate the impact of delayed retirement on overall economic output, on government income and payroll tax revenues, and on public spending, specifically on government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The project consists of several integrated subprojects. The first deconstructs the nature of the later retirement trend, asking which types of workers, in terms of gender, education, skill levels, and income, are retiring later and how they delay labor force departure. The second subproject investigates the nature of the physical and mental well-being of retirees over time. The third and fourth subprojects, which are to be informed by these labor force data, involve macro- and micro-simulation modeling of the impact of a rising retirement age for the economy and for public finances. At the completion of the subprojects, Brookings will organize a public forum in Washington, D.C. at which the research findings will be presented and discussed before an invited audience of policymakers, academics, and governmental and nongovernmental agencies concerned with aging and budget policy.

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.