Founded in 2016 through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and housed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Network Initiative for Conservation Science (NY-NICS) offers access to expert conservation science researchers and state-of-the-art instruments to cultural heritage institutions across the city.  Anchored in material science and chemistry, conservation science as a field is broadly engaged in applying contemporary imaging and analytic techniques to questions of the history of artistic practice, which can range from the adoption of new materials over time to the creative processes of individual artists. Led by Marco Leona, NY-NICS has spearheaded partnerships with 11 key NYC cultural institutions since its founding, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the New York Public Library. This grant joins the Mellon Foundation in its support for the continued operation and expansion of the NY-NICS, allowing it to hire additional staff, expand the network further, and grow its list of partnerships with a particular eye on important but less well-resourced cultural institutions in New York. 

This grant provides continuing support for a series of activities by SFFILM, the organization that hosts the annual SFFILM Festival, to nurture, develop, and champion films that explore scientific or technological themes and characters. Supported activities include the awarding of two $35,000 Sloan Science in Cinema Fellowships each year to promising feature film or episodic screenwriters who are exploring scientific or technological themes in their work. SFFILM also gives an annual award, the Sloan Science in Cinema Prize, to the best science-themed feature film submitted to the San Francisco Film Festival and promotes the winning film at the festival with a ceremony, screening, post-screening panel, and reception. SFFILM compiles the Sloan Stories of Science Sourcebook, which includes the best science stories and the most up-to-date scientific discoveries of the year and offers awards to two filmmakers who can develop original scripts based on these stories or ideas. Lastly, SFFILM partners with the Black List to identify promising science-themed scripts and bring them to the attention of developers, producers, and other film industry executives. Grant funds support these activities and associated operational costs for the next two years.

This grant continues a signature partnership with New York City’s acclaimed Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) to commission, develop, and produce science and technology plays. Over the next three years, MTC will commission between 15 and 18 new plays from both rising and established playwrights that explore scientific themes or feature scientists, engineers, inventors, or mathematicians as major characters. Commissions are selected twice yearly in consultation with an independent scientific advisory panel that serves as a year-round resource to help playwrights ensure scientific accuracy. In addition to the commissions, grant funds will support three to four readings or workshops for Foundation-commissioned plays per year, and one annual presentation of a Foundation-developed play before a public audience of over 100 people as part of the Ted Snowdon Reading Series.

This grant provides three additional years of support for a program at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama (CMU) that exposes top dramatic writing students to science and technology and awards prizes to student screenwriters who write science- or technology-themed scripts. The CMU program includes a fall symposium that brings scientists to the drama school to introduce students to recent developments in a variety of scientific disciplines; a year-long screenwriting workshop that meets weekly and focuses on the challenges and opportunities posed by incorporating science into dramatic or comedic narratives, a mentorship program that pairs film students with working scientists to help them depict science accurately in their work, an annual screenwriting competition that awards $45,000 total per year to the three best science-themed scripts submitted, and a yearly showcase in Los Angeles and New York to bring student filmmakers into contact with leading producers, directors, and distributors in the film and television industry.

The Sundance Film Institute hosts the Sundance Film Festival, the largest and most prestigious showcase of independent cinema in the U.S.  First held in 1978, the festival remains the first choice for both emerging and established independent filmmakers to premiere their work and an offers an unrivaled venue to showcase innovative filmmaking at the intersection of science and cinema. This grant supports a suite of awards and activities each year that have resulted in a widely recognized and fruitful 20-year partnership: the Sloan Commissioning Grant; the Sloan Episodic Fellowship; the Sloan Development Fellowship; the annual Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize (one of only six juried prizes at the Festival); a high-profile panel discussion with scientists and filmmakers; and a reception celebrating the Sloan winners at the Festival.

The Coolidge Corner Theatre is an independent cinema in Brookline, Massachusetts specializing in international, documentary, animated, and independent film selections. The Coolidge is also the leader of Science on Screen, a nationwide network of independent cinemas that invite scientific experts to screenings of popular or cult classic films to discuss with audiences the scientific or technological themes or issues the film raises. The series offers an unexpected, informative, and entirely fun entree into the relationship between science and film. Previous events used the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead as a springboard to discuss the role of the amygdala in cognitive processes and a screening of Fight Club as the beginning of the discussion of the roots of aggression. Grant funds will allow the Coolidge to make grants to 56 local theatres, bringing the total number of independent cinema houses that have participated in Science on Screen to well over 100. In addition, the Coolidge will promote the series through a new digital newsletter, a video for the National Week of Science on Screen, partnerships and sponsorships, and online marketing efforts.

The mathematical theory of differential privacy describes methods and practices that allow researchers to query sensitive datasets while controlling how much each query compromises the privacy of individuals contained in the dataset. This approach represents the cutting edge of privacy-protection, but one that is mathematically subtle and challenging to implement. Widespread use of these methods will require lowering the cost of adoption and adaptation.  OpenDP  is therefore producing a tested, trustworthy, interoperable, and flexible library of software that will make it easier for users to set up differentially private access to sensitive data. This grant provides continuing support for Harvard computer scientist Salil Vadhan, creator of OpenDP, as well as a dedicated community of theorists, engineers, practitioners, and privacy experts that is aiming to increase adoption of differential privacy. Now in its third year, OpenDP is shifting from a minimum viable product to a prospering ecosystem with heightened impact and broadened support. Specifically, grant funds allow Vadhan to expand OpenDP’s library capabilities to meet new application needs; promote OpenDP adoption among social science researchers; and further strengthen the growing community of experts using and contributing to OpenDP.  Eventually, OpenDP will serve as a sustainable open-source library of tools and community dedicated to privacy-preserving data analysis.

The value of letting independent social scientists study the administrative data collected by companies of all sorts is hardly in doubt. Economists are particularly keen on basing hypotheses, models, and economic indicators on such information. Companies are often reluctant to share their data, however, in part due to concerns regarding data privacy, costs, inconvenience, reputational risk, or ethical issues. Recent regulatory measures, which give users control over their data, complicate matters even further. Without better data sharing mechanisms, we may soon live in a world where only a few large companies have access to that data and the insights such information provides. This grant supports Sara Jordan at the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) Education and Innovation Foundation, a strictly nonpartisan and nonprofit organization, who is developing a strategy to further accelerate corporate-academic data sharing. Grant funds provide continued support for the Foundation’s Award for Research Data Stewardship, allow Jordan to prepare compelling use cases to demonstrate how insights generated by administrative data can advance research and evidence-based policymaking, and also allow the creation of a legislative tracker producing real-time analysis to be shared with the research community. Combined, Jordan’s efforts accelerate the safe and responsible sharing of administrative data between companies and academic researchers.

“Consumer surplus” is defined as the total monetary gain to consumers when they can buy an item at a price lower than the maximum price they'd willingly pay for it. If a book costs $20 and three people would be willing to pay $40 for it, the consumer surplus of that book’s price is 3 x ($40-$20), or $60. This metric is frequently used by economists to measure the effectiveness of different policies, particularly those involving antitrust cases. Traditional calculations of social welfare that use consumer surplus, however, ignore the fact that the value of an extra dollar, known as the “marginal utility” of income, can have very different value for different people. Because adding another dollar to their paycheck means less to the affluent than it does to those who are less well off, the latter receive systematically less weight in consumer surplus calculations. This grant supports Matthew Backus at Columbia Business School, who will call attention to those weights by calculating what they actually are for different subpopulations. His goal is to develop an alternative framework to consumer-surplus analysis that makes distributional considerations more explicit. Backus’s new framework will weave distributional concerns into policy analysis, bring transparency to the ways consumer surplus measures weigh the welfare of different demographic groups, and use those weights in policy evaluation to account for distributional issues. One particularly interesting application Backus will explore is examining how public welfare measurements vary when completely different weights are assigned to various demographic groups, starting with equal weights for all.

This grant supports Juan Carlos Suбrez Serrato, a professor of economics at Duke University and faculty associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), who is seeking to improve our understanding of DEI issues in economics by expanding the pool of researchers studying the economics of racial and ethnic disparities. Grant funds will provide one-year fellowships to three postdoctoral researchers whose work addresses labor market disparities, the institutions that reduce or reinforce them, and the ways in which economic choices can affect such outcomes. To reach perspectives beyond those of predominant groups in the profession, the plan is for Suбrez Serrato and the rest of a highly distinguished, diverse, and experienced selection committee to recruit assiduously for postdoctoral candidates from underrepresented groups. Fellows will spend a year working at NBER’s Cambridge headquarters, where they will each both work with a mentor and also network with the Bureau’s wider scholarly community.