Agency, defined here as purposeful or goal-oriented behavior, is often framed as a distinctive—perhaps even defining—feature of life. Beings have an agenda—whether it be finding food, reproducing, or avoiding environmental danger—and it's difficult to understand how a living creature could consist of inanimate matter passively following physical laws and yet also exhibit behaviors that seem—at least from the outside—to be purposeful. Improving our understanding of how agency emerges in a matter system will advance our understanding of how matter transitions to life. Gaining a scientific foothold on agency, however, is not so simple. One needs a living system that resides in the 'Goldilocks Zone' of complexity: complex enough to exhibit agency and yet simple enough that there's reasonable hope of achieving a mechanistic understanding of the processes underlying behavior. Philip Kurian, a theoretical physicist and founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory at Howard University, and Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor of Biology and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, propose Physarum polycephalum as such a system. Physarum polycephalum, henceforth Physarum, is a multinucleate slime mold with the remarkable ability to reassemble into a single organism after being broken into several fragments. Physarum can also "mass-sense", detect and grow towards the heaviest mass in its local environment. This grant supports research by Kurian and Levin to try to gain a scientific foothold on agency through the study of reassembly and mass-sensing in Physarum. Physarum is a good choice for this project because it is a simple cellular organism with no brain to decode; its behaviors are simple motions whose direct mechanistic causes can plausibly be determined. The project has two related goals: obtaining a corpus of novel data that informs the development of behavior-explaining, predictive models of mass sensing and reassembly in Physarum, and testing a hypothesis about how Physarum coordinates these behaviors—Kurian and Levin speculate they are controlled via superradiance in Physarum's cytoskeletal network. The overall plan is to develop a multi-scale (molecular- to cell-scale) model while also performing experiments to characterize Physarum during its search and mass-sensing activities. Dr. Kurian proposes to refine his existing cytoskeletal-superradiance model to better capture Physarum dynamics; in part by adding additional cytoskeletal components (actin & actomyosin) and in part via iteration of experiment and theory-simulation to pin down various model parameters and to benchmark model predictions against observations. The new model will also account for ultraweak photon emission, weak light associated with the metabolic production of reactive oxygen species. Microscopy imaging will then be used to create spatially- and temporally-resolved 'maps' that characterize Physarum during its reassembly and mass-sensing behaviors. They hypothesize that problem-relevant information is stored in cytoskeletal structure and read out by Physarum using a combination of bioelectric, optical, and calcium-signaling transduction mechanisms. These 'maps' will then be used as a way for researchers to access some of the information thought to be informing Physarum's decision-making processes. They will also use a novel Ultraweak Photon Emission (UPE) detector in order to track UPE as an indicator of metabolic activity. For more information visit: https://www.quantumbiolab.com/

Most economists also agree that high or accelerating inflation is dangerous. Feedback loops can lead to hyperinflation and societal instability associated with hoarding, wage spirals, lending reluctance, extreme uncertainty, as well as other mechanisms.There are three main ways that runaway inflation can start. The first two, sudden supply decreases and sudden demand increases, have both occurred as the COVID pandemic has run its course. These shocks have widely been viewed as transitory, however. The third factor, self-fulfilling inflationary expectations, are more worrisome and less well understood. Central bankers therefore fight such expectations aggressively by, for example, imposing dramatic interest rate hikes and promising to "do whatever it takes" even if that means bringing on a recession to dampen demand.So, given the powerful role of inflationary expectations, what do we know about their formation, propagation, distribution, and effects? Most macroeconomic models, to the extent they incorporate expectations at all, oversimplify everything by positing a "representative agent." This helps with solving the equations but leaves out all the details about how different people feel and act under different circumstances. Behavioral Macro, a field Sloan helped launch, is gradually unpacking such "heterogeneity." One major goal is to figure out how expectations management could be better tailored to particular audiences rather than just trying to scare everyone. The necessary data are shockingly spotty, however. Along with their inflation rates, very few countries release population-wide averages of inflation expectations. Critically missing is comprehensive and compatible "microdata," i.e., information about individuals, their situations, and their beliefs concerning inflation. This grant seeks to fill this important gap.University of Chicago economists Michael Weber and Francesco D’Acunto will field an international survey to ask a representative sample of people from around the world about what they understand and expect concerning inflation. Experts ranging from researchers to policymakers have already shown great interest in this expensive and complicated undertaking. The data will be made available to the public with the hope that the success of such a pilot will lead to the running of global surveys like this on an ongoing basis.

Government, business, and individuals all need free and quick access to high-quality data to make good decisions. The 13 principal agencies that comprise the federal statistical system in the United States work hard to provide such information from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. A 21st century statistical system should be able to process and provide data better than ever before. Recently, however, the U.S. statistical system has experienced chronic underfunding, weak interagency coordination, and other serious challenges to the integrity and privacy of their operations. So, we still do not have the kind of modern statistical system that other advanced countries take for granted. Nor is there consensus about how to prioritize or measure actions meant to improve the situation. The American Statistical Association (ASA) will therefore compile a report on the "State of the U.S. Data Infrastructure." The idea is to monitor and call attention to the health of federal statistical agencies. High political and financial stakes make it essential that any such evaluations be conducted in unbiased and authoritative ways. The project lead will be Steve Pierson, Director of Science Policy for the ASA since 2008. Pierson will collaborate closely with Jonathan Auerbach at George Mason University and Claire Bowen at the Urban Institute. The advisory board will be co-chaired by Nancy Potok (former Chief Statistician of the U.S.) and Constance Citro (former head of the National Academy's Committee on National Statistics). After collecting information through a wide variety of modes and sources, the advisory board will vet draft findings by holding a series of in-person workshops and meetings with agency leaders, survey experts, and other key stakeholders. Extensive dissemination of the final report will not only target statisticians, social scientists, and policymakers, but the public as well. The ASA eventually envisions launching a "Center for the Study of American Statistical Infrastructure" that would, among other activities, continue producing reports on a regular basis.

The statistics may not be too surprising, but they are daunting. Although women are better educated than men in general (they receive 55% of all undergraduate degrees), they are severely underrepresented in economics at all levels: undergraduate (only 34%); PhD (35%); and tenure-track positions (22%). Effective interventions to fix this problem are urgently needed, but few reliable ones have been tried, much less tested at scale. Even those policies that have shown promise in small trials (e.g., mentorship programs, study groups, and peer advising) have not yet been widely adopted across large groups of colleges and universities.Anna Harvey, NYU Professor and President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), will launch a "Consortium on Gender Equity in Economics" to identify and support research on practical interventions that, if proven successful, have real potential to be adopted in a wide range of settings. Harvey argues that, given the reward structure in academia, researchers have little incentive to develop, evaluate, or scale interventions that could actually make a big difference, nor are they rewarded for working with university or department leaders who might want to take action but are unsure where to begin.The SSRC will organize this Consortium jointly with the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). The first part of their plan is to fund original research about scalable interventions for increasing the number of women in economics. The SSRC will issue a call for projects that deploy in the fall of 2023. Criteria for selection will be based, in part, on recent theories about what helps programs scale successfully. It helps, for example, to be simple and inexpensive with costs decreasing as the number of participants increases, and to have been developed with the involvement of decision-makers from the onset.Consistent with aiming for impact, the second part of the project will further engage potential adopters. The plan is to hold a series of convenings designed to foster and facilitate uptake of the research results. Funded teams, along with other experts on gender representation in economics, will run special workshops at annual conferences for college and university leaders. Chairs of the 250 economics departments in the CSWEP Liaison Network will also help promote and implement the Consortium’s evidence about what works. For an academic project, this effort is extraordinarily committed to being more than an academic exercise.