The Emulation as a Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) project is an extensive platform for software curation and preservation. Beyond its core functionality, which builds and curates “virtual machines” that can execute any piece of archived software, regardless of the hardware on which it was originally designed to run, the project has responded to demand from partners and developed critical services like a hosted “reading room” for library CD-ROM collections and a Universal Virtual Interactor that can open any digital file natively in the appropriate application (and version) in which it was created. Anchored at the Yale University Library, the project team led by digital preservation manager Euan Cochrane and software preservation program manager Seth Anderson has built out a robust open source codebase, which in addition to production use at Yale has been piloted at 15 other universities and is being adopted by initiatives in Canada and Australia.   This grant supports the continued development and expansion of the EaaSI platform as it matures and moves towards long term sustainability.  Grant funds will support three streams of work: maintenance of the existing EaaSI services; development of automation and other approaches to lower costs for and appeal to new institutional users (with an emphasis on the archiving of computational research pipelines); and market development toward long term sustainability.

In 2020, the Sloan Foundation provided support for an effort led by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Stephen Jacobs to design and launch an undergraduate-anchored program—LibreCorps—to support faculty software projects across the RIT campus. Aimed at both eliciting demand for and establishing the value of open source software projects, LibreCorps is an experiential learning program where students are deployed to work on real world open source software and data projects, supporting faculty partners with direct software development as well as community management, documentation, design, and other forms of non-code contribution. This pilot was successful, with LibreCorps having supported at least 24 faculty-driven software projects on topics ranging from computational astrophysics to ecology to data visualization to cybersecurity to Deaf education.   Funds from this grant provide continuing support for this effort under the broader Open@RIT initiative, supporting two core staff members who are tasked with building relationships, scoping projects, triaging requests, and otherwise ensuring that the program runs smoothly.

This grant funds efforts to develop and launch a set of core activities to support open source software engineering projects across CMU. Planned activities include creating a formal structure for managing software developer relations across the university, mapping the current open source activity across campus, and identifying opportunities which could simultaneously address faculty research needs and student training (including support for undergraduate research experiences).   In addition, the new CMU Open Source Program Office will leverage relationships with key collaborators at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a fully integrated Federally Funded R&D Center (FFRDC), and produce guidance and best practices for the development and maintenance of open source scientific software in the context of intramural federal research organizations. It will also explore how to support open source software developed to interface with a new “Cloud Laboratory” core facility on campus.

This grant provides ongoing support to Benjamin Dubin-Thaler, the founder of BioBus, and the team of 25 community scientists, educators, and nonprofit experts. BioBus started as a state-of-the-art science lab visiting schools in New York City to provide science opportunities aimed at K-12 students. BioBus brings a science field-trip-like experience to under-resourced schools and community groups, and has grown to include afterschool and weekend programs, summer camps, and paid high school and college research internships. Grant funds will allow BioBus to serve more than 115,000 diverse students (over half of their students identify as Latina/o/x and over a quarter as Black) from the Lower East Side to Harlem, as well as other locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, and explore a possible national expansion, while building annual financial support from NYC and New York State governments.

One challenge associated with building a life-like synthetic cell lies in how to power synthetic cell processes. A common mechanism used by natural cells to energize cell activities is the exploitation of an electrochemical gradient across a membrane. This grant funds a project led by Neal Devaraj at the University of California, San Diego to build an artificial system that couples the formation and maintenance of a pH gradient with anabolic chemistry to establish a primitive metabolism in a synthetic cell. Devaraj and his team will use photoacids encapsulated in lipid vesicles as the primitive protocells of this project. The photoacids release hydrogen ions (protons) when exposed to light, leading to an excess of protons within the vesicle. Reagent molecules will diffuse into the vesicle from the surrounding “environment” and become trapped as they acquire an electrical charge by bonding with hydrogen ions inside the proton-rich vesicle. These charged molecules will accumulate within the vesicle due to so-called ion-trapping, a phenomenon whereby a membrane that is permeable to neutral molecules becomes impermeable to charged molecules. The concentrating of reagent molecules within the vesicle will then stimulate an anabolic reaction: synthesis of phospholipids. The synthesized phospholipid molecules are building blocks for cell membranes and developing ways to synthesize these building blocks could prove useful for future efforts to build artificial cells that must be able to grow and divide. Devaraj expects that the synthesized lipids will—driven by hydrophobic interactions—associate into and thereby modify the pre-existing vesicle membrane. Microscopy will be used to characterize changes in membrane morphology, changes that could include membrane growth and division.

Recent improvements in electron microscopy have had a profound impact on cellular biology as they promise to bring a long-held 'holy grail' within reach: the ability to directly visualize nanoscale processes occurring within a cell. This goal—in situ visualization—is important because biological components often change their structure or function when removed from their native cellular environment. This grant supports a project by a team of five principal investigators to build a new type of microscope—a cryo-super-resolution microscope optimized for correlative light- and electron-microscopy (CLEM) that produces 3D snapshots (cryo-electron tomography; cryo-ET)—and to demonstrate the new microscope’s usefulness for the in situ visualization of intracellular structures and processes. Grant funds will support microscope design, construction of the super-resolution microscope, creation of software to run it, and the development of “workflows” defining how to implement CLEM when cryo-ET is the electron-microscopy technique of interest. Additionally, the principal investigators will conduct four demonstration projects in biology that leverage the capacities of the new microscope to obtain in situ structural explanations of a major cellular process. The first project, the clathrin project, seeks to understand force generation during clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), the taking-in of matter by invagination of a cell membrane. The second will produce images that improve our understanding of autophagy, the engulfment and degradation of various harmful objects within a cell. The third project seeks to understand the basic mechanisms behind the formation of a primary cilium, a hair-like entity that serves as an important sensory organelle on virtually all animal cells. The fourth project will use microscopy to visualize (polycomb-regulated) changes in chromatin structure during cellular development. The proposed work represents a next-logical-step in the development of electron-microscopy-for-biology and our corresponding ability to study the cell, the most basic unit of life. To help push this emerging technology out to a broad community, information on how to build and use the microscope will be made publicly available and access to the new microscope will be provided to scientists from across the globe through a visitor program.

This grant supports the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to design, launch, and facilitate a learning community for grantees in Sloan’s Creating Equitable Pathways to STEM Graduate Education initiative, which seeks to develop pathways for Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o/x students from Minority Serving Institutions to STEM graduate programs across the country. Grant funds will allow AAAS to integrate Sloan grantees into the organization’s successful SEA Change initiative, which aims to make diversity, equity, and inclusion normative in STEM higher education through a proven model of systemic reform. Activities delivered through the AAAS “Port of Call” platform will support Sloan principal investigators and their project teams in reaching their project goals. Such activities include community discussion groups; quarterly video conferences; up to four live courses per year; and various forms of engagement with fellow Sloan grantees, SEA Change members, AAAS staff, and leading experts in the field. In-person networking will be facilitated via an annual grantee meeting adjacent to existing AAAS programming, and grantees will be invited to attend award ceremonies, networking receptions, and other events at the AAAS annual meeting.

This grant provides support to New York Times tech reporter Katie Hafner and Sloan Kettering Cancer Center bioethicist Amy Scharf, who are producing three new seasons of their Lost Women of Science podcast series. Grant funds will allow Hafner and Scharf to produce twenty additional episodes telling the stories and cataloguing the contributions of undercredited women scientists. Each new season will feature one major, multi-episode series about a leading, underappreciated female STEM pioneer and four-to-five standalone episodes about unknown scientists about whom there is not enough information for a multi-episode arc. Season Four will highlight the life and contributions of Isabella Aiona Abbot, who discovered over 200 species of marine algae in the Pacific and was the first native Hawaiian woman to earn a Ph.D. in science. This grant will bolster Hafner and Scharf’s complementary efforts to form a research center and archive at Barnard College of Columbia University.

This grant provides ongoing support for the production and distribution of Science Friday, a weekly public radio show hosted by Ira Flatow that reaches over two million listeners each week. Science Friday engages the public through participatory dialogue and conversation, a live call-in show, and Q&As that give listeners a direct line of communication to scientists, mathematicians, engineers, technologists, inventors, science journalists and policymakers. Grant funds will allow Science Friday to continue producing SciArts (a weekly segment seeking to bridge the gap between science and the arts), hold a monthly book club, stream 50 podcast episodes per year, and hold five to ten events per year.

This grant provides ongoing funding to the Sloan Film Program at Columbia University, which supports young screenwriters and directors in creating new work with science and technology themes and characters. Under the stewardship of Trey Ellis, grant funds will allow Columbia to maintain two production awards for short films and provide expanded access to a mentorship program offering a stipend and research opportunities to a shortlist of three screenwriters. Grant funds will also allow the film school to expand an annual seminar into a major event at Columbia’s Lenfest Center for the Arts on the Manhattanville campus, which will include scientists and other researchers in addition to would-be applicants to the Sloan Film Program.