This grant is to support work to study the role of technology (especially VR) in scientific team collaboration. Following on a broad agenda-setting Comment in Nature Human Behavior about the potential applications of the metaverse for science, Gomez-Zara and colleagues propose two experiments to explore the dynamics of scientific collaboration across different technology platforms. The first study will compare the performance of small teams collaborating to perform scientific tasks in person vs. via Zoom vs. in VR. The second study will introduce an additional variable, the presence of an AI team member powered by a Large Language Model, to understand whether participant interactions with the AI agent vary across the same three contexts. Questions about how the perceptions of and interactions with AI agents might be influenced by the medium of interaction are of particular interest and underexplored in human-AI interaction research community.

Scientists are exploring the use of generative artificial intelligence for a number of tasks both general to the scientific process and specific to different disciplines: hypothesis generation, literature review, peer review, and software production. This grant supports a study of the latter by University of Michigan researcher Elle O’Brien, focusing on how individual scientists and scientific groups/labs are adopting and deploying Generative Artificial Intelligence products and services when collaboratively coding and developing scientific software. The three-phase research design will begin with qualitative interviews and observations, followed by a survey and set of ethnographic case studies. O’Brien will document the current use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in scientific software production broadly, as well as focus on specific practices such as verifying code and translating from one programming language to another, exploring themes of trust and collaboration.

Founded in 2019, the Research Software Alliance (ReSA) aims to catalyze community-led collaborations within the research software engineering community to address global challenges associated with the development and maintenance of research software. Funds from this grant support three activity areas over the next two years. First, ReSA will establish two ongoing fora targeting important groups within the broader software engineering ecosystem, providing a venue for these communities (like National RSE associations, publishers exploring software review, or research infrastructure providers) to regularly meet, surface common challenges, and propose and discuss solutions.  Second, ReSA will begin initial planning and foundation-setting for convening the first ever international research software conference, to be held in 2025 or 2026.   Finally, ReSA will create a micro-grant program, making small grants available for community-led meetings on a diverse array of international issues that, if fruitful, could blossom to become official ReSA task forces addressing pressing global challenges in research software development. Grant funds will support salary of key ReSA staff, travel, and seed funding for the micro-grants program.

This grant builds on the success of the University of California, Santa Cruz OSPO to support open source software development across six University of California campuses--Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego. Th network will engage UC faculty and student work on open source software, pooling resources to avoid duplication of efforts across the state, while at the same time leveraging the unique local strengths of each partner campus. Each of the participating UC campuses will receive some base funding to tap local capacity, build relationships and engagement, and launch an Open Source Project Office over the two-year grant period, while in addition Santa Cruz will support network-level coordination and a system-wide Open Source Leadership Group (OLG). Grant funds will also support the development of a platform for discovering and tracking open source software across the UC system, a set of practical tools to assess the sustainability of open source projects, and a pilot “containerization as a service” capacity that will make open source software more accessible and usable across the UC system.

This grant funds an expansion of an ongoing partnership between the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey and the University of Buffalo to create sustainable pathways for undergraduate students at Puerto Rican universities to successfully pursue graduate degrees in chemistry.  Grant funds will allow the partnership to expand by adding two undergraduate institutions in Interamerican University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón and Arecibo and one graduate partner in Texas A&M University. The collaboration’s activities center on hosting outreach seminars and other recruitment initiatives on the Puerto Rican campuses; selecting 6 students each year to participate in a 10-week summer research and mentoring program at Buffalo and Texas A&M; providing additional academic enrichment activities for selected participants during the academic year and summer; and providing paths to admission into University of Buffalo and Texas A&M graduate programs. Other activities include embedding graduate preparation workshops into existing curriculum at UPRC, expanding mentor training to more faculty at Buffalo and Texas A&M, and initiating transition awards for students who decide to pursue graduate study.

The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Undergraduate Program (MSRI-UP) at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath, formerly MSRI) is a comprehensive six-week summer program for undergraduate students who demonstrate exceptional potential for and interest in pursuing graduate studies in mathematics. The goal is to identify talented students, especially those from underrepresented groups, and make available to them meaningful research opportunities and a community of academic peers and mentors. Each year, MSRI-UP invites 18 students to the UC Berkeley campus, where their academic curriculum consists of two weeks of structured coursework followed by four weeks of supervised, group research. Additionally, students attend workshops on applying for and succeeding in graduate school, including career conversations with professional mathematicians. Weekly research colloquia feature a variety of mathematical topics and applications. At the end of the summer, students produce formal reports and give oral presentations on their research to their cohort and invited guests. MSRI-UP programming continues throughout the following year, focused on how to present work at research conferences, submit articles for publication, and eventually apply for graduate school.

This grant renews support to Howard University for an ongoing project to strengthen its economics department and bolster its research capacity. Howard is the only Historically Black College or University with an economics doctoral program and one of just 20 granting both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics. Grant funds will be used to increase Howard’s capacity to recruit, educate, and graduate students through providing tuition support for 8 doctoral students and research stipend support for 1 postdoctoral scholar, 5 undergraduates, and 5 graduate students.  Other grant funds for faculty professional development will target roughly 10 early- and mid-career faculty members, offering opportunities to attend key conferences, seminars, workshops, and other activities. Taken together, the efforts aim to 1) elevate the impact and influence of Howard University within the field of economics; 2) cultivate a more resilient and extensive research standing; and 3) increase the number of diverse Ph.D. economists and educators.

In 2022, the Sloan Economics Program funded three postdoctoral fellowships at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) for scholars studying racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes. This grant renews Sloan support for three more appointments during 2025-2028. Each fellow will spend a year at the NBER’s Cambridge headquarters pursuing their research agenda, interacting with NBER scholars, and participating in professional activities throughout the Boston area. Each will also benefit from mentoring by a senior professor who shares their research interests and who will arrange training and networking opportunities. To facilitate interaction and foster a sense of community, fellows will be invited and funded to attend the NBER Summer Institute in subsequent years. The distinguished Selection Committee—led by PI Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato (Stanford)—includes Trevor Logan (Ohio State), Jim Poterba (MIT), and Ebonya Washington (Columbia). They are looking for potential to contribute to the scientific analysis of racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes, with priority given to recruiting candidates from diverse backgrounds. Promising research areas include racial and ethnic differences in family structure, socioeconomic status and health care access, and experiences with the criminal justice system, and the extent to which discrimination and neighborhood effects contribute to these disparities.

What can science funders like Sloan do differently to produce more scientific breakthroughs? There is consensus among scientists, for example, that funders do not take enough risks and that grant-seeking is so unduly onerous that it can distort their incentives. Are they correct? What difference does it make? Economists are not only working to find out, but also to devise and test new mechanisms that can improve grant-making. The results get better when economists, scientists, and science funders all interact before, during, and after these studies take place. To accomplish that, there are few places better than the Science of Science Funding (SoSF) meetings at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute, which attracts participants from major private funding institutions, government funding agencies, and organizations like USPTO, the U.S. Census Bureau, Science Magazine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Co-PIs Reinhilde Veugelers and Megan MacGarvie will lead the next phase of SoSF, with goals that include: promoting a more focused research agenda; strengthening ties between economists and the institutions they study; and engaging more graduate students and early-career faculty in the community. They will organize more than half a dozen meetings over the next three years, including annual sessions at the NBER Summer Institute, annual NBER meetings on the Scientific Workforce, and a stand-alone “stock-taking” conference for science funders. Proceedings from this major conference will be published as a curated volume designed to make widely accessible the key results and open questions from the economics of science funding literature to date. The PIs will also lead site visits to scientific research facilities, organize workshops and dissertation feedback sessions for PhD students, and establish a small travel grants program to enable early-career researchers to visit the scientific organizations or science funders they intend to study