Each summer, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, an independent nonprofit based in Berkeley California, invites 18 talented mathematics undergraduates to the UC Berkeley campus for the summer to provide them with a high-quality research experience in the mathematical sciences.  The program recruits talented undergraduate students from gender and racial/ethnic populations historically underrepresented in the mathematical sciences and focuses on equipping them with the training and the support network to enter and succeed in graduate study.  The program receives high marks from student participants, and program alumni apply and are admitted to graduate programs at a rate much higher than the national average.  Grant funds provide core operating support to the program for a period of four years.

This grant supports the production and airing of Your Brain, a two-hour NOVA television special about the latest developments in neuroscience. To be hosted by Heather Berlin, a neuroscientist, clinician, and science communicator, the special will use Berlin’s personal history, work with patients, and research on the neural basis of the unconscious as a frame for discussing a variety of important developments in neuroscience, including brain-machine interfaces, creating artificial brain tissue, understanding consciousness, and cutting-edge treatments for mental health disorders. Grant funds will support production of the special, along with associated promotion and outreach to ensure a wide, diverse audience.

Surface-to-volume ratios are orders of magnitude larger indoors compared to outdoors. As a result, air-surface interactions play a significantly more important role in indoor chemistry than in typical atmospheric chemistry.  This grant provides ongoing support for the work of surface chemist Vikki Grassian of the University of California, San Diego to examine the fundamental chemistry of indoor surfaces. Using a variety of techniques, including X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, vibrational spectroscopy, and atomic force microscopy, Grassian and her team will observe and analyze the interactions between gases and particles, on the one hand, and various surfaces commonly found indoors, on the other.  The team’s focus will be on better understanding the fundamental mechanisms of reaction chemistry, including oxidation reactions, surface reactions of chlorine-containing cleaning products, and nitrogen oxide chemistry that leads to the formation of nitrous acid. Grassian’s experiments have been designed with an eye toward ensuring collected data can be usefully integrated into existing models of indoor air chemistry.   This project will result in new knowledge on the fundamental chemistry that occurs on indoor surfaces and new data for input into indoor air quality models. The results will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at conferences and meetings, with at least two students and one postdoc being trained.  

This grant provides partial support to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) for a consensus study on the research needs and implications of emerging indoor chemistry research.  NASEM will convene an ad hoc committee of scientific experts and leaders to examine the state-of-the-science regarding chemicals in indoor air. It will collect new findings about chemical reactions, sources of chemicals, and the abundance and distribution of chemical species indoors.  The committee will then examine how these new findings fit into existing scholarship about the link between chemical exposure, air quality, and human health. Based on this information, the report will contain consensus findings on the key implications of this scientific research, including potential near-term opportunities for incorporating what is known into practice, and will identify topics and issue areas where additional chemistry research will be most critical to understanding the chemical composition of indoor air and the consequences of adverse exposures. The report will also identify current methodological or technological barriers to advancing our understanding of indoor chemistry and areas where enhanced coordination or collaboration are necessary for continued progress.   Grant funds will support forming and convening the committee; at least one information-gathering workshop; and the composition, review, publication, and dissemination of the committee’s report.

This grant supports a consensus study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) on the evolution of behavioral economics on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the field. Overseen by an independent committee of 15 experts from diverse fields—including economics, psychology, and cognitive science—the report will draw on a wide range of perspectives to synthesize four decades of research, catalog the field’s increasing relevance to policymaking, celebrate the work of seminal researchers, raise unaddressed challenges, and identify promising avenues for future study. The final report, tentatively titled Assessing Behavioral Economics at Age 40: A Consensus Study, will be widely disseminated and available to academics and the public alike.

This grant provides continued operational and administrative support to the Economics of Digitization working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Led by economists Shane Greenstein of Harvard Business School and Catherine Tucker of MIT, the group convenes researchers from a wide variety of economic subdisciplines to develop and nurture a research community focused on the economics of digitization. Research topics explored by the group include the economics of AI, labor market consequences of the rise of the digital economy, the effects of regulatory policies on economic outcomes in the digital marketplace, and the economic effects of digital misinformation. Future research topics under consideration include platform economics, competition and regulation, the economics of privacy, and the potential and consequences of algorithmic bias. Grant funds will support two annual meetings, an annual Digital Economics Tutorial, a conference on the economics of privacy in the digital age, a series of “boot camps” for junior researchers, and a small grants program to stimulate promising research in the area by young scholars.