Communal computing is a new computing paradigm in which people work together side-by-side in the real world, using their hands to create and explore computational models made of physical materials. In this project, a biotechnology lab will be restructured around communal computing, and a complete science project will be carried out in this new computing environment. The goal is to demonstrate an unprecedented level of visibility, agency, physicality and in-person collaboration. This effort aims to set the stage for a comprehensive transformation in how all scientists do their work together. This grant will support proof-of-concept use of the Realtalk system in a specific scientific context. Grant funds will support the construction of Realtalk communal computing environments which will be used by Shawn Douglas and others in his lab to advance the technology of DNA Origami.

Created by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) and first released in 2023, STRUDEL is a planning framework and design system of research software workflows that distills best practices in interface and user experience (UX) design discovered and refined from more than a decade of project work by LBNL researchers.  This grant provides funding for coordinated efforts between UC Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS) / LBNL, Superbloom, The Carpentries, and 2i2c to grow the awareness and adoption of STRUDEL among scientific software developers as the platform moves towards financial independence and sustainability.  Funded activities over the grant period include iterative expansion and improvement of STRUDEL based on community feedback, outreach to user communities from diverse institutions, development of platform infrastructure for training and outreach events, and new curriculum on UX design leveraging The Carpentries model.

The Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS) provides dedicated network-level resources to facilitate information sharing between Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in academic and research institutions. Having served a critical role in defining the landscape and onboarding Sloan’s grantees into a larger community of practice in which they can compare ideas and learn from each other, the CURIOSS team is positioning to thoughtfully grow the community well beyond non-Sloan-funded OSPOs, connecting those new entrants to best practices. With this multi-year grant, they will continue to hold space for candid information exchange via monthly community calls and yearly in-person meetings of the active members but will also grow opportunities to engage with external like-minded individuals, departments, and organizations. Finally, they will build on the success of their resource development, supporting individual members who volunteer to lead working groups to create case studies, training materials, and other collaboratively authored documents.

Over the past two years, the Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO) has encouraged open source software development at the University of Vermont by supporting hundreds of faculty and students on campus, engaging with close to 70 companies and local community organizations, building strong intra-university relationships with the offices of technology transfer and the Vice Provost for Research, and adopting a model for student-driven clinical work on specific open source development projects. This grant provides two years of continued support for these activities as VERSO moves towards institutionalization and independent sustainability as part of the Vermont Complex Systems Institute and the office of the Vice President for Research. Grant funds will provide continuing core operating support, as well as initial salary support for a new Research Software Engineer position. VERSO expects that, after the two-year runway of grant funding, a combination of dedicated internal funding, external grants, state/government partnerships, and industry support will cover all core operating costs, with student and software engineering support expanding elastically as demand increases.

This grant provides two years of continuing support for the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Saint Louis University (SLU), as part of the Sloan Foundation’s ongoing efforts to institutionalize support for open source software in the research enterprise. SLU has found particular success in integrating open source into the student experience. Their key innovation has been in developing support for faculty-driven open source research software through a scaffolded system of paid graduate (masters) students who mentor undergraduate students participating in a capstone Computer Science class. In 2023, every graduating undergraduate Computer Science major at SLU engaged substantively with open source software development through this program. Grant funds will be used to continue these core activities as well as to expand and institutionalize the OSPO inside SLU.  Planned activities include transitioning the training for graduate students in practical open-source skills to a for-credit capstone/educational requirement. The leadership team also plans to develop revenue streams from both faculty-driven external grants and industry partnerships, and to develop a reserve fund to buffer against the ups and downs of external funding.

This grant provides renewal funds to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to continue the design and facilitation of a hybrid learning community for grantees of Sloan’s Creating Equitable Pathways to STEM Graduate Education (Equitable Pathways) initiative, which invests in educational pathways from Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to STEM graduate programs nationwide.   AAAS takes a three-pronged approach to advance projects, partnerships, and pathways within the grantee community. Namely, 1) leveraging collective action, shared capacity building, and equitable practices to accelerate change; 2) empowering and equipping Sloan grantees to integrate sustainable practices toward creating lasting and long-term impact; and 3) generating and disseminating knowledge that advances understanding of equitable partnerships between MSIs and non-MSIs.   Funded activities under this grant include, orchestrating a suite of virtual offerings, including monthly cohort and quarterly community sessions that promote learning and discussion both within and across grantee cohorts; providing access to AAAS’s online SEA Change resources, such as synchronous and asynchronous courses, joint virtual sessions with SEA Change members, and community interviews with leading subject matter experts; hosting an annual in-person, joint conference for Equitable Pathways community participants and the broader SEA Change community; and developing and conducting mixed-methods research that will identify the key determinants of equitable, productive, and long-lasting relationships between MSIs and their institutional partners.

In 2021, more than 100 economists and public policy scholars signed an open letter supporting investments in home-and-community-based services (HCBS) that address the caregiving needs of elderly Americans. “Investing in home care,” they wrote, “makes economic sense: it will create jobs, seniors and their families prefer it, it will reduce spending by shifting people out of nursing homes and improve care outcomes.”   The challenge, however, is not whether to provide the elderly with HCBS, but precisely how. To do the most good with limited resources, which services should be offered to whom? Faced with such complicated decisions, economists like to imagine quasi-experiments where you can vary the parameters and see what happens. In the case of HCBS, such interventions are actually being performed all the time. Specifically, federal Medicaid programs both cover and document nearly half of all spending on formal long-term care; differences across states in how they allocate that spending create an opportunity for learning which policies work best for whom.   To enable such research, PI Gal Wettstein and his team at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research will compile and publish fine-grained data about how states have been, since 2000, changing their reimbursement plans for over 60 different HCBS services. Wettstein’s team has assembled resources like this in the past that many academics have cited, analyzed, and linked with other datasets. In this case, three papers are already planned and will be supported under the grant. The first of these concerns informal caregiving, specifically the impact of HCBS funding schemes on the probability that informal care is provided, on the hours of informal care provided, and on what types of help with activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) are provided. The study will also assess how HCBS coverage affects the health and well-being of spousal caregivers, as well as the ability of adult child caregivers to move further away from the care recipient—perhaps in search of better employment or housing, for example. The second study concerns the workforce of formal caregivers, particularly how coverage of home care services affects labor market factors such as: the employment of registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and nurse aides; the wages in these occupations; and their demographic composition. This is of special concern because the nurse aide workforce is typically low-wage, and disproportionally composed of immigrants and people of color. And the third research paper concerns health outcomes of long-term care recipients, including not only their probability of hospitalization, their rate of acquiring more ADL and IADL limitations, and their mortality rates, but also their self-assessed health and life satisfaction. While some literature suggests that more generous spending on HCBS overall does improve health outcomes, say by reducing unnecessary hospitalizations, researchers have previously been unable to isolate which types of services are particularly effective without the detailed data this project will provide.

Why do some regions of the United States flourish while others flounder? Economists have long studied such questions, of course. What has changed recently is the federal government’s active commitment to address regional disparities and inequities. This introduces new demand for practical answers as well as new occasions for experimentation and data collection—not to mention new opportunities to influence billions in new spending, much of it specifically intended to help turn technological innovations into sustainable businesses.   In response, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) proposes to unite three of its traditional initiatives: the Entrepreneurship Working Group, the Entrepreneurship Research Boot Camp, and the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program. Led by co-PIs David Robinson (Duke), Sabrina Howell (NYU Stern), and Josh Lerner (Harvard Business School), this joint project will specifically focus on how economic processes and policies can encourage or impede the launch of new businesses that commercialize innovations and help regions prosper.   The project will, for example, run a workshop each fall on place-based questions in entrepreneurship and innovation. Rather than solely featuring new results from academic research, however, these gatherings will also include presentations from private investors and government officials—including representatives from the NSF and the Commerce Department—who can discuss the structure of new federal programs for promoting innovation in areas of the country that have historically been left, or pushed, behind. Near the end of the project, NBER will host a capstone conference for policymakers, practitioners, and journalists in Washington. Papers from that meeting will distill practical lessons learned for publication in an edited volume.   To support graduate students and other early-career researchers, NBER’s Entrepreneurship Boot Camp meets for a week each summer and has an excellent reputation. Sloan funding will specifically provide lectures and training about spatial disparities in economic development. Campers will further discuss, dissect, and disseminate research presented at other meetings funded by this grant as well.   Guiding all these activities will be an advisory panel of public officials and private entrepreneurs. They will not only help prioritize research directions, but also help plan and participate in the NBER meetings. Above all, they will help make sure researchers are asking the right questions, accessing the right data, accumulating the right connections, and accelerating our understanding of regional innovation. 

For decades, questions have been raised about whether the postdoctoral system in the United States is achieving its goals. The United States currently supports more than 60,000 postdocs spread about the sciences, engineering, and medicine. Overall, less than a third move on to tenure-track positions. Biomedicine stands out both for the scale of its reliance on postdocs and for the limited number of faculty openings for them to fill. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds almost half of all postdoctoral fellowships, and it spends over $1.6 billion per year doing so. NIH has begun to discuss alternative funding schemes for young researchers. In other countries, for example, recent PhDs routinely find long-term, respectable, and satisfying work as “staff scientists.” How could something like that work here? What would it cost? Whether to fund more postdocs or staff scientists, that is the question. And it is a hard one requiring insights from labor economics, public finance, the science of science funding, experimental economics, etc. With Sloan support, economists Donna Ginther (Kansas) and Bruce Weinberg (Ohio State) will lead research on whether postdocs and staff scientists currently function as complements or substitutes in the production of research output. They will make use of administrative data about grant spending compiled by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), a resource that Weinberg helped launch with Sloan funding. They will also use text analysis to study author contribution statements and postings for biomedical job openings in industry. This will allow comparisons of how the roles of staff scientists and postdocs progress generally and, in particular, whether postdoctoral training does provide benefits for those who end up in industry and for their employers. Results will be incorporated into the “Science of Science Funding” project at NBER, which Sloan also supports.

When running experiments, a social scientist can expect to observe the outcome of treating a given individual at a given time under given circumstances. But what the experimenter never gets to see directly is the counterfactual outcome that would have been obtained had the very same individual not been treated at that very same time under those very same circumstances.   That is why so many empirical social scientists love randomized controlled trials (RCTs). By assigning people randomly to either the treatment or control group, RCTs are designed to make sure there are no statistical differences between one group and the other at the outset. If the experiment reveals statistically significant differences between those two groups when it is over, then we have good reason to conclude that the intervention must be the cause. One big problem, though, is that RCTs are often impractical or even unethical. And unless researchers have access to very large samples, they usually produce reliable estimates of average treatment effects only,   Andrew Gelman of Columbia University has dedicated his career to developing and applying techniques that provide empirical evidence in complicated settings where desirable data may be incomplete or unavailable. Like many social scientists, he favors “Bayesian” methods over “Frequentist” ones that natural scientists prefer since, in many cases, they actually can repeat the same experiment over and over. Bayesians start with prior beliefs about a probability distribution in question, then systematically adjust those beliefs based on all the experimental evidence. Gelman specifically constructs reasonable priors using a process of “multilevel modeling.” His approach recognizes that treatment effects are heterogeneous from the outset and provides additional structure for breaking down those estimates by subgroup even when data are sparse.   Together with Jori Korpershoek, Gelman will develop a unified Bayesian approach to estimating causal effects in cross sectional data from both panels and time series (i.e., the kinds of data most empirical economists study). They aim to express standard ways of estimating average treatment effects as cases of a more comprehensive algorithm in which each method amounts to comparing differently weighted means. Rather than having researchers concoct specific weights, as is current practice, Gelman and Korpershoek will prescribe methods for estimating the weights that will in turn produce better and more efficient estimators.  Their open-source and user-friendly software will extend those methods to allow for the reliable estimation of individual treatment effects based on Bayesian multilevel modeling.