This grant provides support for the Equity in Graduate Education Consortium, led by Dr. Julie Posselt at the University of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education. The Consortium brings together change-ready universities, graduate programs, and leaders to align policies and practices with commitments to equity and inclusion. Building off the successful California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE),  grant funds will allow Posselt’s team to develop a tiered membership model for the expanded consortium; host activities, including a workshop series and training for campus-based facilitators; create new modules, curricula, and facilitation guides; develop a framework for enacting systemic change in graduate education; and work with their new and existing institutional partners to create equity action plans tailored to the needs and circumstances of each university. In addition to other public and private universities, participating campuses include Sloan’s University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring institutions.

While tax data is highly sought after by social scientists, it is costly, sensitive, and difficult to access. The IRS has historically released public-use files—privacy-protected databases of sampled individual income tax returns—but has stopped producing them due to high costs and high vulnerability to re-identification attacks. This grant provides ongoing support for Claire Bowen at the Urban Institute, who is working with the IRS to develop synthetic versions of individual income tax return data. Synthetic data has mathematical and statistical properties that are similar to those of the real data, but that contains almost no private information from the original dataset. Grant funds will allow Bowen to continue developing two synthetic datasets, making substantial methodological improvements and exploring the application of differential privacy methods to assess the privacy attributes of this methodology. In addition, Bowen will make open-source code available on GitHub, document the methodology for use by other agencies, and disseminate the work through a white paper, blog posts, presentations, and journal articles.

The Sloan University Centers for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) initiative is a series of grants to universities around the country that are working to transform graduate education to better attract, enroll, and graduate Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o/x doctoral students in STEM fields. Grant funds primarily provide direct support to graduate students to be used in support of their studies. The remaining funds support a diverse and interrelated set of activities and resources designed to create an equitable, inclusive, and supportive educational environment conducive to successful doctoral completion and subsequent career success. The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering acts as the Foundation’s partner and fiscal steward for the program. This grant provides three years of continued support to the UCEMs housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, San Diego.

This grant supports Joseph Brewer and a largely Indigenous-led project team at the University of Kansas (KU) to improve Indigenous representation in the STEM professoriate and workforce by piloting a Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) program at their university. SIGP is a coalition of nine higher education institutions devoted to creating and sustaining inclusive, connected, and supportive educational environments conducive to successful advanced degree completion and subsequent career success for Indigenous students. Brewer and project team member Melinda Adams are themselves SIGP alumni. Grant funds will support the Kansas team in providing robust funding packages for SIGP Sloan Scholars; developing and offering training and resources to university faculty to improve their skills and abilities in mentoring Indigenous students; creating a supportive community for Indigenous graduate students, and establishing and broadening support networks for all Indigenous students at KU; and engaging with the national SIGP team to support the adoption of best practices for supporting Indigenous students. A central feature of the project is the development of a Sloan Undergraduate Scholars Program via KU’s existing partnership with Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU). This partnership will bolster efforts to connect STEM-specific pathways between HINU and KU and facilitate a near-peer mentoring program, with SIGP scholars at KU serving as mentors to SUSP scholars at HINU.

The Internet of things (IoT) has transformed our lives and become an integral part of the home environment—estimates calculate there are now 75 billion connected devices worldwide, generating around 180 trillion gigabytes of data each year. That data includes personal and sensitive information that is constantly being compromised in various, largely hidden ways, leaving consumers exposed to data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other violations. This grant supports efforts by Consumer Reports, led by Ben Moskowitz, to design a cybersecurity labeling system for IoT devices. Modeled on Nutrition Facts-like labels that allow consumers to compare products and make informed choices, the new labeling system would evaluate products and services based on how well, or how badly, they safeguard consumer privacy and security. Grant funds will allow Moskovitz’s team to continue testing the privacy and security of consumer IoT products, prototype a functional IoT security label, and conduct usability testing, consumer education, and other validation work to prepare for a successful launch of a national consumer IoT labeling scheme. The project promises to inform and empower consumers with immediate, clear, actionable insights while driving security-improving innovation.

This grant supports Ekaterina Holdener at St. Louis University who is establishing an Open-Source Software Center (OSS Center) at the university that will, among other activities, launch a program to facilitate graduate students and undergraduate student participation in faculty-driven open-source research software projects. Over the grant period, Holdener anticipates that the new program will allow at least 120 student contributors to support some 30 faculty-driven software projects. Additional funds will pay for a host of other activities designed to support the new OSS Center, including the development of organizational infrastructure and systems, requirements and design checklists, the publication of a playbook of OSS Center-related activities and programs on building open-source software capacity in university settings; and the training of an estimated 16 graduate student in computer science, data science, and software engineering. Funds will provide financial support for Holdener, 16 graduate student employees, and a full-time program director.

This grant provides ongoing support for the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI), to maintain and improve the Sloan Science & Film website, scienceandfilm.org, for a further three years. The website, led by Sonia Epstein, remains the most up-to-date, comprehensive resource for the Sloan Film Program, and also offers over 200 articles and interviews with science filmmakers, plus an additional 20 articles about film written by scientists. Grant funds will allow MoMI to publish two new articles on the Sloan Science & Film site each week, for a total of 250 over the grant period; commission over 20 original articles by research scientists; produce at least 8 Science on Screen public events annually; curate at least one science-themed gallery exhibition at the museum; update the site with new Sloan-winning media; promote and disseminate a short film teacher’s guide and a feature film companion guide; form partnerships with science and cultural institutions; represent the initiative at festivals and events; host annual networking events, produce a lookbook of Sloan-winning films; produce a development catalog to become a community resource for the Sloan film community; and award the 2022 Sloan Student Prizes.

This grant supports work by V. Joseph Hotz at Duke University, Ruobin Gong at Rutgers University, and Ian Schmutte at the University of Georgia, who are leading an initiative through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to support research on privacy-protecting methods of data analysis. Of particular interest are how different implementations of such methods manage the inevitable trade-off between privacy and accuracy. Grant funds will allow the team to commission 18 research papers, including an NBER working paper series and an NBER proceedings volume; organize two in-person conferences and two virtual meetings on topics surrounding the use of privacy-protected data in empirical research; and foster interactions among researchers in economics, statistics, and computer science. Funding will be used primarily to cover expenses associated both with the commissioned papers and with the research conferences.

This grant provides ongoing support to American Experience, a popular and award-winning PBS history documentary series to integrate science and technology themes and profiles of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. Grant funds will allow American Experience to research, produce, and broadcast two new one-hour documentary shows telling historical tales about the overlooked contributions of women and people of color in science and technology. The Sun Queen will tell the story of Maria Telkes, a physical chemist who was consumed from an early age by the potential of using the sun as a viable energy source. Zora Neale Hurston, meanwhile, recounts the story of the famous writer and Harlem Renaissance literary figure who led a second, less well-known life as a pioneering anthropologist. The two films will be broadcast during primetime on PBS.

This grant provides ongoing support for Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) to continue its Sloan science and theater program. Grant funds will allow EST to commission 45-50 original, full-length plays dealing with science and technology themes from both emerging and established playwrights; premiere five productions of science or technology themed plays on the EST mainstage; and continue for three years EST’s influential First Light Festival, an annual celebration of science and technology in the theater filled with readings, workshops, and related events. Other funds support EST in a series of partnerships that help prestigious regional theaters around the country both commission new science and technology themed plays, and stage plays originally developed or produced at EST.