What interventions can promote equitable economic growth in regions left behind by the tech boom? Regional economic development is an increasingly urgent challenge for Sloan, for the United States, and throughout the world. Scholarly research needs to address innovation, prosperity, opportunity, and equity as related. One book that takes this on is Innovation in Real Places by Dan Breznitz, Professor in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He documents how the vaunted success of places like Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and Taiwan has been good for only a very few males from the upper classes and bad for most everyone else. Regions that simply try to emulate existing tech hubs waste lots of time, money, talent, and energy. Understanding how a given area can find its own niche in the global production processes makes much more sense.Together with two co-directors, Breznitz now leads the Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity (IEP) program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).  The program brings together an international group of researchers from economics, sociology, geography, engineering, robotics, and history to develop a new approaches to studying place-based innovation, prosperity, and opportunity.  Sloan funds will help support IEP program operations including regular research workshops. CIFAR will also award Catalyst Grants to fund novel research collaborations among IEP program participants.

This grant supports the launch of the University of Michigan's Distributed Teaching Collaborative (DTC), a cross-institutional partnership that aims to address issues of underrepresentation in the study of robotics. Led by computer scientist Odest Chadwicke "Chad" Jenkins, the University of Michigan is partnering with faculty at Morehouse College and Howard University (both Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and Berea University (the first integrated co-ed college in the South) to increase the quality and breadth of robotics education available to undergraduates at these institutions. The DTC involves several activities, including developing and sharing undergraduate robotics curricula across the partner institutions, enabling student access to cutting-edge courses that would otherwise be unavailable to them; co-teaching courses in order to provide students opportunities to engage with leading robotics scholars at UMichigan; and providing UMichigan-sponsored grading and office hours, in order to lessen the burden on partner faculty that may be facing high-teaching loads. The result will be a significant expansion in the partner institutions’ ability to provide quality instruction in robotics, and prepare interested students for potential graduate study in robotics at UMichigan or elsewhere.Course materials will be open source and the collaboration will develop best practices that other institutions can use to establish similar programs in robotics education and which have the potential to evolve into a standardized training and credentialing program to prepare students for graduate school.

For the past four-and-a-half decades, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education has been the leading framework for recognizing and describing institutional diversity in U.S. higher education. Its uses and influence are wide-reaching. From federal government funding formulas to national higher education rankings, to higher education scholarly research, the Classifications serve as a foundation for how to organize and describe individual educational institutions and institutional sectors. They also often serve to hierarchically organize institutions, which can lead to perverse incentives. One of the most well-known is the race to become an "R1" university (classified as having "very high research activity") and thus tap into federal and other dollars earmarked for institutions of that category. Given the value of an R1 designation, many argue that institutions put aside other important work to prioritize acquiring the coveted R1 status.This grant supports a joint effort by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to refine the Carnegie Classification system by adding a new universal Social and Economic Mobility classification that recognizes those colleges and universities who have been successful in fostering social and economic mobility for traditionally underserved students. This new classification would lift up those institutions who are doing important work to promote racial equity and economic mobility, give federal agencies and private funders alike an easy way to identify these institutions for funding, and would hopefully incentivize non-designated institutions to adopt institutional practices that would earn them the classification, much like the R1 designation influences institutional priorities today. In addition to the new Classification, the project team will also review and revise the Carnegie Basic Classification and launch a new system of Elective Classifications.Grant-funded activities include ACE's convening of an esteemed technical review panel that includes leading economists and other quantitative researchers, the formation of the creation of at least four governance and advisory groups, including one made up of institutional leaders (e.g., college presidents), and the development and implementation of a robust outreach and dissemination plan.

There is significant funding in the NYC STEM K-12 education system for field trips, curricular supplements, and after-school programs, and public schools are empowered to develop their own partnerships with private organizations that provide STEM educational enrichment services. In the absence of a comprehensive list of the available options, however, principals and teachers have to rely on personal relationships or word of mouth to discover opportunities. Moreover, even if schools and providers do connect and are interested in partnering, frictions like procurement processes can present substantial obstacles to building a working relationship that serves educators and students.ExpandED Schools is a NYC-based nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that all young people in New York City have access to enriching afterschool programs that affirm their identities, teach them valuable skills, and spark new possibilities in and out of the school day. ExpandED Schools hosts the NYC STEM Education Network ("the Network"), which brings together over 90 city agencies, schools, after-school programs, youth-serving organizations, science museums, universities, public and private funders, and intermediaries with an interest in STEM education. Many members operate after-school, field-trip, and summer programs. The Network hosts regular community convenings to spark new ideas, deepen partnerships, and collaborate on ways to serve overlapping communities and increase their reach overall.ExpandED Schools and the Network have begun developing ways to broker and support new partnerships, including direct outreach events between schools and after-school STEM providers.       This grant supports efforts by ExpandED Schools to scale up the Network’s efforts to better connect STEM providers with schools in historically underserved communities. The Network will hold several      District-level events      and will increase the likelihood of successful partnerships by building up resources and technical training for STEM providers as well as making "minigrants" of up to several thousand dollars to subsidize their initial engagements with new schools. Sloan funds will build the Network’s staff capacity with an additional full-time hire to manage and coordinate all of this work, under the leadership of the volunteer Steering Committee and working group chairs.

This grant looks to add to the body of research on residential electrification by examining the collective effect of installing an integrated set of electrification technologies in concert with one another, as opposed to individually. This research will study the effects of coordinating the functionality of these integrated technologies across homes in an attempt to identify possible additional community-level benefits, focusing on an under-studied subset of the housing stock: pre-manufactured homes. Pre-manufactured homes are a particularly important aspect of the housing stock given that low-income populations disproportionately rely on these buildings and there is the potentially unique opportunity for electrification upgrades to be installed since these homes are produced in regularized, standardized ways. A highly collaborative and interdisciplinary team led by Paulo Cesar Tabares-Velasco, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado School of Mines, will assess the benefits and challenges associated with installing holistic, community-scale electrification and energy retrofits in at least two low-income, pre-manufactured mobile home communities in Colorado. Additional co-PIs include experts in electrical engineering and microgrid management systems (Mohamad El Hariri), computer science and digitization in the built environment (Gabriel Fierro), behavioral economics of residential energy decisions (Ben Gilbert and Ian Lange), and political science and energy policy (Kathleen Hancock). The collaborative and interdisciplinary team has developed an integrated electrification home-retrofit package called "eHDER." The suite of eHDER technologies consists of (1) ensuring an energy efficiency building envelope with thermal storage; (2) an upgraded heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system; (3) use of digital home energy management systems and smart controls that also provide community-level feedback; and (4) installation of renewable distributed energy resources in the form of solar photovoltaics. Up to 90 homes will be outfitted with the full eHDER package.Given the community-scale focus of this work, this project prioritizes collaborations between local organizations, and the academic team will work with three different organizations to help engage study communities, implement the physical eHDER retrofits, and manage continued study operation and management. These partners include the Colorado Energy Office, the local utility in Black Hills Energy, and the nonprofit organization GRID Alternatives to assist with community solar installation. Most notably, the project will work with Resident Owned Communities (ROCs)—mobile home communities that have collectively purchased their homes and the land underneath them—to engage residents in the two study sites. A local, ROC-certified nonprofit, Thistle, will assist with community engagement and ongoing project management.In addition to academic publications and the energy system retrofits, project outputs are also expected to include an open-source dashboard, validated and publicly available community energy models, new course materials on sustainable communities, and video reports intended to engage broader non-technical audiences. The team will also engage the participation of a Technical Advisory Committee comprised of community leaders, city and state engineers, utility representatives, and policy experts to help design the research and expand the team’s outreach.

Whole Cell Models (WCMs) provide a useful platform for understanding how a holistic organism emerges from many distinct yet coupled processes. WCMs developed to date, however, are primarily biochemical/kinetic models that don't explicitly account for physical and spatial cell processes. This grant supports a project by Roseanna Zia, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, to fill this gap through developing a more biophysically-focused whole cell model. Such a model would differ from a kinetic model by, for instance, explicitly tracking important biomolecules as they execute Brownian motion in a crowded cellular environment; one where molecular motion is influenced by hydrodynamic forces within a viscous cellular fluid and where interactions between important molecules are explicitly accounted for via measured and/or computed atomic-scale bio-molecular structure.Specifically, Professor Zia will build a physically- and biochemically-resolved model of the JCVI-syn3A minimal cell (henceforth, the "minimal cell"). The minimal cell is a synthetic version of a bacterium created at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Starting with a bacterium having a small genome (M. genitalium, 525 genes), Venter researchers repeatedly grew the bacterium, each time removing one gene to determine if that gene is essential to life. If the bacterium can—absent a given gene—grow, replicate, and divide to make offspring, then the gene was not essential to life. The minimal cell (493 genes) is the cell remaining once all non-essential genes have been deleted from the original genome.While kinetic WCMs seek to unify the relevant collective biological knowledge by assembling many different models and associated datasets, the approach proposed by Professor Zia is closer to a first-principles approach to modeling. It's more geared to simulating basic physical and chemical interactions between bio-molecules using a limited set of input data. By accounting for physical and chemical interactions between bio-molecules, a physical model could predict many of the chemical reaction rates that would instead be inputs to a kinetic model. One significant benefit of a physical model is that it's better positioned to discover cellular phenomena. For instance, while gene functions are 'hard-wired' into kinetic models, physical models should be able to discover the function(s) of various genes by accounting for the proteins encoded by the genes and then studying what those proteins do in the in silico cell.Professor Zia will pursue a multi-scale modeling approach that strikes a compromise between computationally expensive modeling that is accurate on an atomic-scale but can only simulate nanoseconds of cell life, and systems-level modeling that sacrifices atomic-scale accuracy but can simulate cell processes over minutes at a time.The model will consist of three basic elements: a confining container (cell membrane); individual representation of the physical shape, size, and relative abundance of biomolecules; and accurate, computationally efficient representation of biochemical and physical interactions between biomolecules. Zia will pursue three proposal aims to develop the model. Under Aim 1 she will specify what's in the cell and where it's located; specify the interactions and transport properties of bio-components; and benchmark the model against experimental data. Under Aim 2, she will make a list of proteins and other molecules whose atomic-scale details (physical structure and surface charge) are explicitly taken into account in the model. Under Aim 3, Zia will use the model to address several open questions in cellular biology that explore various mechanisms by which physical processes influence biological function.