Recent federal policy has led to the establishment and reinvigoration of many agencies and programs devoted to spurring the development and commercialization of clean energy technologies. Examples include the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, tax credits provided through the U.S. Treasury, the Loan Programs Office, and the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy. This grant funds a project led by Jonas Meckling at the University of California, Berkeley and Laura Diaz Anadon at the University of Cambridge to comprehensively identify these programs, document the strategies they employ, and study their impact on energy technology commercialization outcomes. Various methodological approaches will be brought to bear on these questions. First, the research team, will collect qualitative data about the institutional characteristics and functions of these programs, drawing on document reviews, interviews with key stakeholders, and other sources of information. They will then use this initial analysis to identify different institutional design features that warrant further quantitative study. In the second phase, the team will analyze energy technology commercialization by examining two databases that track patenting, investments, and other outcomes. Finally, the team will produce an analysis of a select subset of institutions through comparative, in-depth case studies that detail how these public sector organizations operate and function. The team’s political economy lens will allow the research to go beyond mere funding levels to assess a fuller range of the market-shaping impacts these institutions have in the clean energy ecosystem, such as helping to prioritize clean energy technology development goals, de-risk future investment, and facilitate learning within and across industries.

Each year SFFILM awards two feature film prizes to recognize excellence in science-themed filmmaking: the $20K Sloan Science in Cinema Prize which is awarded in December in advance of the Academy Awards; and a second, Science on Screen award, given out at its April film festival, which includes screenings and panels with scientists.  SFFILM also supports two screenwriters a year with a fellowship that includes a cash award, residency and mentorship by filmmakers and scientists. SFFILM also compiles an annual list of the ten best discoveries in science and gives a prize to two filmmakers to develop one discovery into a screenplay.

Launched by the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 with Sloan support, the Science and Entertainment Exchange (the Exchange), is an ongoing project to increase the quality of scientific content in American film and television through providing directors, producers, and other Hollywood executives with access to high quality consulting by real working scientists and researchers. Providing more than 250 consultations a year, the Exchange works to ensure accuracy when science is used in film and television, seeds new ideas within Hollywood by exposing creative and industry professionals to new scientific content, and acts as a well of professional advice across a wide range of scientific topics. This grant provides support for the Exchange for a period of three years and includes funds to continue the Exchange’s core work of providing science consultations, funds to expand and diversify the Exchange’s roster of science consultants, and funds for a series of in-person and online events showcasing women and Black, Indigenous and Latine scientists and engineers. 

The Coolidge Corner Theatre is an independent cinema in Brookline, Massachusetts specializing in international, documentary, animated, and independent film selections. Since 2008, the Coolidge has been the Foundation’s partner for Sloan Science on Screen, a nationwide program to support independent cinemas — spread across 44 states and Washington DC — 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 and informative entree into the relationship between science and film, showing that any film can lend itself to intelligent analysis, as well as fun, when viewed through a scientific or technological lens. Sloan support will allow Coolidge to make grants to 70 participating theatres, bringing the total number of independent cinema houses that have participated in Science on Screen to more than 110.

Understanding how matter complexifies, ultimately towards life, is a longstanding challenge embraced by the Matter-to-Life program. Since life as we know it is primarily chemistry, the challenge amounts to understanding how complexity and function can emerge and grow in a complicated chemical network. This grant supports Leroy Cronin, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, to deploy a systems chemistry approach to addressing this question. Cronin will leverage state-of-the-art robotics to enable long-term chemical evolution experiments that exploit a new parameter that quantifies molecular complexity that is both experimentally accessible and embedded within a larger theoretical framework. Cronin plans to use that framework to nudge a chemical system towards ever-increasing complexity. Selection as a concept is most commonly deployed within Darwinian evolution, where natural selection refers to the preferential survival of individuals with certain genetic traits by means of natural controlling factors. Here Professor Cronin proposes to observe selection within a chemical system, and in this context, selection refers to the preferential survival of molecules with certain traits by means of natural controlling factors (the local environment). Cronin is primarily interested in one trait: complexity. Professor Cronin will use a measure of molecular complexity called the “assembly index.” The assembly index of a molecule is, in essence, equal to the number of ‘steps’ (chemical bonds) needed to construct the molecule using system-dependent basic building blocks (atoms or molecules).  Cronin has demonstrated that assembly index is well-correlated to three relatively-easy-to-perform types of measurements: mass spectrometry, IR spectroscopy, and NMR spectroscopy. The research team will run recursive chemistry experiments that rely on automated measurements to determine which molecules are present and adjust conditions to nudge a system towards a ‘selection regime’ where new forms of complexity are generated. The adjustable conditions include things like temperature (heating & cooling), evaporation and rehydration, how long a mixture is stirred, the duration of an experimental cycle, solution pH, whether various minerals are added, and whether or not an electrical discharge is applied. Cronin expects that a single experiment (a series of cycles) will run continuously for several hundred cycles, corresponding to several weeks or months. Over that time, there are four types of complex molecules / structures that the researchers will seek to detect: self-reproducing molecules and autocatalytic sets; production of high assembly index molecules; formation of primitive sequence polymers; and emergence of microscopic containers.

Training the next generation of researchers is an essential component of any healthy academic field. Here William Bialek and Joshua Shaevitz, Professors of Physics at Princeton University and Co-Directors of the Center for the Physics of Biological Function, request three years of support for a Center Fellow pursuing physics-of-life research. This prestigious postdoctoral fellowship will offer a young researcher both intellectual freedom and a support structure, and grant funds would support either a theorist or an experimentalist. A fellowship offering intellectual freedom to an early-career scholar is typically challenging to fund through federal agencies focused on supporting specific projects, despite the fact that this freedom can play an important role in establishing a young scientist as an independent researcher. The Center for the Physics of Biological Function is a partnership between Princeton and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; a partnership anchored by a core community of sixteen CUNY/Princeton faculty. The Center focuses on science at the interface of physics and biology with the goal of creating ‘a physicist’s understanding of living systems: a physics of biological function that connects the myriad details of life, across all scales, to fundamental and universal physical principles.’ Center Fellows will be offered a competitive salary, travel funds, and independence to select a compelling line of research. The Center Fellow is not obligated to any particular faculty member, instead the Center exposes young physicists to problems posed by a wide range of living systems and gives them ‘considerable freedom to explore these problems, crossing boundaries among topics that would be in separate groups or departments at most institutions.’ This freedom is balanced by a support system as the Fellow is held accountable to formulating a feasible plan by interacting with senior Center faculty, and there’s a community of Fellows that provide peer advice and guidance.

Systems chemistry is a branch of chemical research that examines large, complicated chemical networks and focuses on understanding how complexity and function can emerge from the many diverse chemical interactions within the network. This grant provides support to a team led by Rein Ulijn, Professor of Physics and Director of the Nanoscience Initiative at the City University of New York Graduate Center, to induce a chemical system to demonstrate a life-like behavior; specifically, a primitive form of learning and memory. Dr. Ulijn’s basic chemical system will be composed of peptides (short proteins; a sequence of amino acids) that -with the help of an enzyme- can be reversibly combined into more complex peptides (oligopeptides). The team plans to expose a chemical network to a molecule that acts as an environmental stimulus that will cause a reaction, the formation of new peptide molecules and various phase-separated peptide ‘structures.’ After removing the stimulus molecules from the network, they will be re-introducing at some later time.  If the network responds more rapidly to the stimulus than when the molecules were first introduced, it has, in a basic sense, “remembered” the initial stimulus and ‘learned’ to respond faster.  The project begins by choosing an initial set of (2-6) interacting dipeptides. Molecular dynamics simulations will inform selection of the initial dipeptide system to ensure that the dipeptides have a propensity for self-assembly. This makes it likely that more complex peptides and (peptide) structures will form. Once an initial system has been selected, the researchers will synthesize the system in their lab, allow the peptide chemistry to run to a steady state, and then characterize the steady state distribution of peptides and phase-separated structures in the unperturbed system (i.e. before a stimulus molecule is introduced). The formation of oligopeptides and phase-separated structures will be monitored using a combination of microscopy, optical spectroscopy, liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, and dynamic light scattering. Once the steady state properties of the unperturbed peptide system have been characterized, a stimulus molecule will be introduced and the researchers will characterize how the distribution of peptides and the formation of structures is modified. The characterization will be done for each of several stimulus molecules (flavor molecules grape, raspberry, banana and apple) selected based on their simplicity and because they offer a systematic variation in chemical-interaction potential.  Finally, the researchers will determine whether repeated exposure to a given stimulus molecule can condition the system to respond more rapidly; the stimulus molecules will be removed between exposures. The researchers will study how learning and memory are influenced by variation of experimental parameters such as pH, temperature, and molecular target concentration. They’ll also test the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory lies in remnant structures retained by the solution. This idea will be tested by using heat to melt any remnant structural nuclei; something that should eliminate any observed memory effects. Beyond demonstration of learning and memory induced by a single type of stimulus molecule, the researchers will also explore exposure to competing stimuli, by examining whether mixing of separately conditioned solutions yields a different response when compared to that obtained from a solution conditioned by simultaneous exposure to several types of stimulus molecules.

This grant supports a research team led by Amar Vutha, Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto, to search for evidence of new fundamental particles by making careful measurements of atomic nuclei. Professor Vutha will pursue a well-known particle discovery strategy -searching for so-called time symmetry violation in nuclei- but will pursue a new approach to performing the measurements. The new method is expected to improve nuclear time-symmetry-violation measurement precision by a factor of one hundred to one thousand. Time-reversal refers to negating time in the equations used to describe a physical system. Intuitively, it means that time flows backwards rather than forwards. Time-reversal symmetry means that particles follow the same equations irrespective of whether one runs the clock forward or backward (one can’t determine which way the clock runs by watching the particles). Many laws of microscopic physics are time-reversal invariant, but not all. More to the point for this project, the known sources of microscopic time-reversal asymmetry (T-violation) are inadequate to explain the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry of the universe and new particles that participate in T-violating interactions are needed to explain that asymmetry. The traditional approach to searching for new T-violating particles / interactions involves making measurements on a modest number of free neutrons or atoms. By contrast, Vutha will search for nuclear T-violation using an octupole deformed nucleus embedded within a solid-state crystal. There are three primary reasons this new approach could significantly improve nuclear T-violation measurement precision. First, atoms in a solid-state crystal are more highly compacted than free atoms (or neutrons) so many more atoms can be measured. This improves precision. Next, the atom proposed for these measurements has a spatially deformed (i.e. non-spherical) nucleus and this enhances sensitivity to nuclear T-violation by a factor of 100 to 1000. Finally, the solid-state crystal lattice has a large internal electric field, and this too enhances a T-violation signal. Grant funds will support three primary workflows: design and construction of the experimental apparatus, identification and mitigation of sources of statistical noise and systematic error, and the use of precision optical and radio-frequency spectroscopy to perform T-violation measurements on the system.

This grant supports a team at Imperial College London that aims to discover evidence for one or more new fundamental particles that may explain an important open question in physics: why the universe is filled with matter yet lacks antimatter. This question will be addressed by carefully measuring the shape of an electron – whether it’s round or aspherical – because an electron will be aspherical if it interacts with particles that treat matter and antimatter differently. These particles could explain the observed matter/antimatter asymmetry. Michael Tarbutt, a Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, will lead a five-year project to improve the relevant measurement precision by a factor of forty. The increased precision will either reveal evidence for one or more new fundamental particles, or set a new upper limit that constrains the properties of as-yet-undiscovered particles. The laws of physics treat matter and antimatter identically, and it’s thought that there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter immediately after the big bang, so the absence of antimatter in the universe is a deep mystery that challenges fundamental physics. The discovery of a new particle could explain this mystery, along with others such as the nature of dark matter. There are two leading detection approaches that achieve comparable precision. One approach measures a high density of neutral molecules for a brief time (milliseconds) as molecules move rapidly through a measurement apparatus; here, limited measurement time constrains achievable precision. The second approach measures static molecular ions for a relatively long time (seconds) and measurement precision is limited by the fact that ions cannot be tightly packed because they’re electrically charged, and they perturb one another. Professor Tarbutt proposes a new best-of-both-worlds approach: use molecules that are static so they can be measured for a long time, and neutral so they can be compacted to high density (measure many molecules). He aims to achieve this by performing an experiment using neutral molecules contained within an optical-trap. An optical-trap (or optical-lattice) is a type of container for atoms and molecules formed by overlapping several laser beams in a region of space.