The NBER Summer Institute is a three-week megaconference that takes place every July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It brings together thousands of economists from 50 subfields and over 400 institutions to participate in dozens of overlapping workshops. Agendas are built through an open call for papers and curated by over 150 organizers who select papers, invite discussants, and design sessions. Additional field-building activities include econometric methods lectures, research bootcamps for PhD students, first-timer breakfasts, late-afternoon networking events, and fellowships that support participation by faculty from minority-serving institutions. From 2026 to 2028, this grant will help pay for meeting rooms, audiovisual services, group meals, and other costs. Nearly all sessions and lectures are livestreamed and posted on the NBER YouTube channel. Together, these investments strengthen the economics profession by supporting intensive workshops, new collaborations, and broader access to frontier research.

In the search for exoplanet biosignatures, researchers have obtained an unprecedented volume of atmospheric spectra in recent years; primarily due to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST; online since 2022), with more data expected in the coming years and decades as several planned, ground-based, large telescopes come online. The relevant signal for quantifying a possible biosignature is the atmosphere’s spectrum: the amount of light transmitted through the atmosphere, at different wavelengths, when the planet passes in between its star and Earth. By determining which wavelengths are transmitted through the atmosphere, one can, in principle, determine which molecules are present in the atmosphere and then infer if those molecules imply the presence of life on the planet. There are challenges, however, to analyzing atmospheric spectra for the presence of molecules that signal life. First, current analysis models are too slow (computationally inefficient) and therefore only able to analyze a spectrum for the presence of one or two molecules at a time; this compared to a list of about 14,000 candidate biosignature molecules. Second, the library of known/tabulated molecular spectra is small, containing data for only a few hundred of the potential 14,000 biosignature molecules. Funds from this grant support a team led by Cecilia Garraffo, Director of the AstroAI Center at the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to address both of these issues. Garraffo and her team will use advanced statistical techniques to iteratively improve a widely used analysis model, called POSEIDON, so that it can progressively analyze atmospheric spectra for many molecules at a time, rising eventually to an estimated 2000. In parallel, the team will use advanced machine learning techniques to develop, train, and validate an AI tool to predict how a molecule’s characteristics determine what sort of atmospheric spectra its presence would produce, adding an estimated 2000 molecules to the library that astronomers could use spectral analysis to search for. The effort, if successful, would lead to a significant improvement in our capacity to search atmospheric spectra for signs of extrasolar life.

This grant renews support for the Sloan Science on Screen Program in partnership with the Coolidge Corner Theatre, an independent cinema in Brookline, Massachusetts. The program provides awards to independent cinemas across the country to support science and film programming. These events showcase scientific experts at screenings of popular or cult-classic films for a discussion about the films’ scientific or technological themes. Sloan support will allow the Coolidge to make new grants to 70 participating theaters over the next two years, bringing the total number of independent cinema houses that have participated in Science on Screen to well over 150.