This is one of a trio of three-year renewal grants from the nation's leading film schools to continue awarding screenwriting and production awards for science and technology films and to hold an annual science and technology seminar. Many producers are now combing through all the Sloan student winners for new scripts. Our 2008 Sloan Summit, which showcased the work of student winners, attracted executives from the major studios and independent film companies. New York University Tisch School of the Arts, arguably our strongest overall performer, has continued to develop and refine its program. This year they propose several changes, including the addition of a "script doctor"-Professor Ezra Sacks, an established screenwriter-to advise and assist students in the development and writing of their screenplays. These changes and improvements have all been offset by cuts in other parts of the budget so the only net increase from 2006 is a small one for film production-from $20,000 to $25,000 a film or an increase of $10,000 a year for three years-because production costs have increased significantly. From the start, NYU Tisch has demonstrated a high degree of commitment and belief in this program. Tisch, usually tied with University of Southern California for number one in the national film school rankings, has devoted more faculty, administration and resources and given out more awards than any other Sloan film school. Trustee Campbell excused herself from the meeting when this grant was discussed.

Film Independent is one of the largest and most prominent film organizations dedicated to independent films in the United States. FI sponsors screenings, special events, film education and talent development for its 6,000 filmmaker members, who include established Oscar-winning actors and directors. Film Independent performed very well with the one previous two-year grant they received, yielding two outstanding projects: Basmati Blues, a romantic comedy with Bollywood elements about a female geneticist from the U.S. who goes to India to help farmers with genetically modified rice; and The Man Who Knew Infinity, a tale about the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan. FI requests a renewal for two years of continued support for the Producer's Lab grant, an intense seven-week program that focuses on ten scripts each year, and would also like to establish a $25,000 named fellowship for a second science-themed project. This fellowship would include a $10,000 production grant, underwriting for participation in Fast Track, an intensive film financing market that takes place at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and year-round support and resources from FI, including mentorship from science advisors. The thrust of both these programs, as with projects like Hedy Lamarr, is to try and push more of these science and technology film projects into production and distribution.

Since 1998 students in our Minority Ph.D. Program who are committed to or are considering academic careers and their faculty mentors have been invited to participate in the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB). The current request from SREB is for a three-year renewal of our grant that enables them to invite our students and faculty to the Institute and to run the next conference of campus directors with the Institute in 2010. For the most part, SREB proposed to continue doing what it has done successfully in the past. They will also make significant improvements in the areas of evaluation and in making participation in the Institute more meaningful to the students and faculty in our Indigenous Graduate Partnership Program. Participation in the Institute and the biennial conference is now an established and valuable component of the infrastructure of our minority programs that we would like to continue.

Financial crises are thankfully infrequent. That means looking for patterns requires lots and lots of data. Two top macroeconomists, Ken Rogoff from Harvard and Carmen Reinhart from the University of Maryland, have been collecting financial crisis records covering many variables in many countries and going back many years. Their main finding is that, even though people always like to say, that this time is different, financial crises do follow patterns. Having heard about this work, scholars from around the world have contacted Reinhart and Rogoff about gaining access to their data and contributing even more data to expand the historical record. Rather than keeping this wealth of information to themselves, they plan to create a living and open-access database that researchers and the interested public can put to good use and help to expand. Launching this "International Financial Crisis Database" not only represents a great service to the field, it is also consistent with the Sloan Foundation's tradition of facilitating cooperation by scholars from around the world in compiling comprehensive, high quality, and open access research tools.