This grant provides support to New York Times tech reporter Katie Hafner and Sloan Kettering Cancer Center bioethicist Amy Scharf, who are producing three new seasons of their Lost Women of Science podcast series. Grant funds will allow Hafner and Scharf to produce twenty additional episodes telling the stories and cataloguing the contributions of undercredited women scientists. Each new season will feature one major, multi-episode series about a leading, underappreciated female STEM pioneer and four-to-five standalone episodes about unknown scientists about whom there is not enough information for a multi-episode arc. Season Four will highlight the life and contributions of Isabella Aiona Abbot, who discovered over 200 species of marine algae in the Pacific and was the first native Hawaiian woman to earn a Ph.D. in science. This grant will bolster Hafner and Scharf’s complementary efforts to form a research center and archive at Barnard College of Columbia University.

This grant provides ongoing support for the production and distribution of Science Friday, a weekly public radio show hosted by Ira Flatow that reaches over two million listeners each week. Science Friday engages the public through participatory dialogue and conversation, a live call-in show, and Q&As that give listeners a direct line of communication to scientists, mathematicians, engineers, technologists, inventors, science journalists and policymakers. Grant funds will allow Science Friday to continue producing SciArts (a weekly segment seeking to bridge the gap between science and the arts), hold a monthly book club, stream 50 podcast episodes per year, and hold five to ten events per year.

This grant supports the production of Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda, a weekly podcast where the internationally acclaimed actor and science communicator interviews the nation’s leading intellectuals, scientists, artists, advocates, and thinkers.  Grant funds will support seven episodes of Clear+Vivid, now in its 14th season, to allow Alda to conduct interviews with scientists on a range of interesting and socially relevant topics, including AI, social cognition, brain trauma, robotics, neuroscience, psychiatry and optogenetics, philosophy in science, and forgetfulness. Episodes will be released through major podcasting platforms, on Clear+Vivid’s feed, and will be promoted by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, the nation’s leading science communication research, training, and education organization. The episodes will be released in late 2021 and early 2022.

This grant supports the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) new podcast series, How to Fix the Internet, which explores the challenges posed by big tech and what consumers can do to protect themselves and their privacy and security. EFF is an international digital rights group focusing on technical tools, litigation, and public education. Over the course of two seasons of ten one-hour episodes, its new podcast will give listeners an awareness of and appreciation for the technologies that surround us every day, the policies and choices embedded in those technologies, and the role of corporations and laws in steering our digital world—allowing people to make more informed choices as they gain a deeper understanding of new technologies.

This grant continues core operational support for the production and broadcast of Planet Money, National Public Radio’s (NPR) award winning media brand devoted to the production of accurate, accessible, and engaging reporting on the American economy. Planet Money is best known for its acclaimed twice-weekly podcasts, which take deep dives into the latest economic news and reached over one million downloads per episode during their first month. More recently, Planet Money launched a new, short-form economics podcast, The Indicator, which is produced daily and allows them to be more responsive to the news cycle. To date, The Indicator averages over 350,000 downloads in its first month, which brings the total monthly audience for Planet Money podcasts to nearly 1.4 million listeners. Grant funds will allow Planet Money to continue the production of more than 300 podcast episodes per year—approximately 100 new episodes of Planet Money and approximately 200 new episodes of The Indicator—as well as five to six episodes of its online video series, Planet Money Shorts, and 150 TikTok videos each year.