Funds from this grant support the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) in its role as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s administrative partner for the University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM), Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP), and Sloan Centers for Systemic Change (SCSC) signature initiatives. NACME provides grants management, scholarship disbursement, and programmatic design and oversight for UCEM and SIGP campuses, including high-touch interaction with Sloan Scholars and program grantees. NACME also collects, compiles, and analyzes program data, including data on Sloan Scholar demographics, recruitment, retention, and graduation outcomes. Other grant funds support community engagement activities, including the design and oversight of programming offered at the annual SREB Institute on Teaching and Mentoring and coordinated engagement with the Sloan Scholars Mentoring Network.

This grant to University of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education funds its Equity in Graduate Education (EGE) Consortium which will provide strategic support for 10 Sloan Centers for Systemic Change (SCSC). Participation in the EGE will equip SCSC project teams with data, tools, and change management strategies to achieve systemic change. The EGE Consortium model is one of cohort-based learning within and across universities through a “networked improvement community” approach. Campus teams develop and implement action plans that create ongoing systems of faculty and other forms of development. Teams are typically made up of 6-10 people, including 2-3 liaisons to consortium leadership who act as point persons and a conduit for the professional development that EGE provides its campuses. Funded activities include virtual workshops, bi-monthly liaison meetings, and an in-person meeting for campus liaisons. Up to six hours of individualized coaching/consultation is available to each team. A “train-the-trainer” model is employed such that liaisons host their own campus workshops for faculty, staff, and students using material developed by EGE. Each SCSC campus will enroll in one of three “tracks” to focus their professional development and institutional change efforts, selecting from 1) Admissions & Recruitment, 2) Mentoring & Wellbeing, and 3) Equitable Selection Systems. The tracks will be developed, refined, and delivered in collaboration with content experts complementary of the EGE leadership team.

This grant provides three years of partial, continued support to the Sloan University Center of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) at Duke University. The UCEM theory of change posits that through financial support, strong mentoring, supportive community, and institutional commitment, students in STEM can thrive and institutions can change graduate science and engineering education in ways that make it more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable for all. In addition to providing core support for the Duke UCEM, grant funds will enable the university to advance recruitment efforts and foster new partnerships with Minority Serving Institutions; strengthen student support with an emphasis on multi-level mentoring, student mental health and well-being, and the cultivation of new faculty champions; and identify resources and approaches to sustain and institutionalize the UCEM and its work beyond Sloan funding. Grant funds will be administered by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, the Foundation’s administrative partner for the UCEM program.  

Funds from this grant support student scholarships at six Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP) campuses between 2024-2028: University of Arizona, University of Kansas, University of Montana, Montana State University, Purdue University, and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. As the Foundation’s administrative partner, NACME distributes the scholarship funds and provides other, related support (e.g., verifying student eligibility, tracking account balances, reporting to the Foundation, etc.).

A nation’s industrial strategy consists of state interventions to support specific industries that are deemed strategically important. Such policies can help to correct externalities and coordination failures as well as provide key public goods. One example is the investment made by the Department of Defense’s research and development organization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the experimental computer network ARPANET – the precursor to the internet – in the late 1960s. The undertaking was too costly, risky, and uncertain for any private sector actor to undertake. But once in place, companies joined in and the internet as we know it is the result. The theoretical and empirical economics literature on industrial strategy is still underdeveloped, not least because the Washington Consensus that emerged during the 1980s favored free-market policies and limited government interference as drivers of economic growth. Times have changed, however, with recent geopolitical challenges pushing industrial strategy back into the foreground of economic policy discussions worldwide. A growing body of empirical research suggests that well-designed industrial strategy can effectively drive economic growth, while ongoing studies explore why particular types of policies function better in some settings than others and how industrial strategy has changed over time. At the field’s forefront are early-career scholars Reka Juhasz (University of British Columbia) and Nathan Lane (University of Oxford).  Together, they founded the Industrial Policy Group (IPG), an international empirical economics lab devoted to this topic.  The IPG uses large-language models to classify policies in ways that enable cross-country comparison and rigorous econometric analysis. They plan to publish their comprehensive, granular, and standardized dataset and demonstrate its usefulness in proof-of-concept research on how industrial policies are used around the world. They will also complete at least four other projects, including a descriptive paper on the political economy of industrial strategy; a methods paper on measuring industrial policies from news text; and two evaluation papers on the efficacy of industrial strategy in East Asia after World War II and globally after the year 2000.  The PIs’ demonstrated commitment to fostering a highly diverse, inclusive, and collaborative culture will also ensure that a growing number of graduate students will receive high-quality mentorship, training, and co-authorship through their involvement in these projects.

J-PAL North America (J-PAL NA), established in 2013 with Sloan support, is a regional branch of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a global network of scholars who employ randomized control trials (RCTs) to evaluate policy interventions. In the decade since its founding, J-PAL NA has tested hundreds of interventions to improve the lives of low-income Americans and make government work better for all. Researchers associated with J-PAL NA have, for example, used RCTs to investigate the causes and consequences of discrimination, revealing potential levers for reducing racial disparities in settings such as healthcare delivery, education, and the criminal justice system. More such work is needed, though, as federal, state, and local governments are demanding rigorous evidence on how to increase racial equity through their programs, services, and budgetary decisions. J-PAL NA proposes to expand its infrastructure to support more RCTs on racial equity under the guidance of its newly appointed Racial Equity Advisory Committee. In addition to helping revise the organization’s project selection criteria and develop new resources to empower researchers with early-stage projects to apply for support, the Committee will publish a cross-disciplinary literature review that identifies theoretically grounded interventions in need of rigorous testing.  Examples include RCTs that explore the drivers of and solutions to structural racism as well as RCTs that examine ways to inspire behaviors that improve racial equity among groups holding power. Concurrently, J-PAL NA will launch its first targeted initiative for RCTs on racial equity, disseminating the call for proposals broadly and purposefully to increase the diversity of applicants.  It will publish guidance on new application requirements – for example, providing overviews of stratification economics and theories of race and discrimination.  They will also offer researchers skills-building sessions on proposal writing and on the practicalities of running a rigorous field test.

Due to global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical tensions, the United States is once again adopting explicit industrial strategies.  This follows a long period where free-market policies were primarily favored instead. With the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Commerce Department, and other federal agencies are receiving billions of dollars to support the nation’s competitiveness in critical industry sectors and seeking academic expertise to help them spend it wisely. Columbia University’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) was launched in 2000 by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. It is a global network of economists, political scientists, and research centers whose mission is to produce high-quality research and translate it into practical guidance for policymakers.  The IPD now has specific plans to establish a high-profile program for novel research on industrial strategy. One prominent IPD expert is Co-PI Eric Verhoogen, who is evaluating the impacts of different types of industrial strategy – to incentivize product innovation; to increase exports; to improve the allocation of government grants for startups; and to encourage the adoption of energy efficient technologies – through ongoing large-scale experiments . Another is Co-PI Martin Guzman, the former Minister of Economy in Argentina, who serves as IPD Co-President alongside Stiglitz.  Together, Stiglitz, Verhoogen, and Guzman will run an academic program to answer foundational questions about why, when, and how to use industrial strategy. Other major grant activities include two international conferences as well as training new experts in this previously neglected field.

Though there are significant resources available in the New York City public education system for educational enrichment activities like field trips, curricular supplements, and after-school programs, there is no comprehensive source of information on available options, and principals and teachers often must rely on personal relationships and word of mouth to discover appropriate opportunities. Moreover, when schools do find an educational enrichment provider they have interest in partnering with, these organizations are often unprepared for the bureaucratic processes necessary for accessing city funds, like procurement paperwork or getting background clearances. The NYC STEM Education Network (“the Network”) supports the community of STEM learning providers across the five boroughs. Hosted by ExpandED Schools, an intermediary nonprofit organization that delivers full-scale learning and development opportunities to students and educators throughout New York City public schools, the Network brings together over 150 city agencies, schools, afterschool programs, youth-serving organizations, science museums, universities, public and private funders, and intermediaries with an interest in STEM. The Network hosts regular community convenings to spark new ideas, deepen partnerships, and collaborate on ways to serve overlapping communities or increase their reach. The Network hosts district-level outreach and “speed-dating” events to introduce schools to a wide range of local after-school STEM providers and provides micro-grants of up to $5,000 to support initial school / STEM provider partnerships. Grant funds will allow the Network to continue and scale up these activities over the next two years, targeting six NYC school districts that most lack STEM enrichment opportunities, supporting an estimated 5,000 underserved NYC public school students. In addition, they will continue to run technical workshops for Network members on how to navigate NYC policies and processes, and generally support the growing community of STEM learning providers in the City.