Grants Database

The Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships), totaling roughly $80 million dollars in annual commitments in support of research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics. This database contains grants for currently operating programs going back to 2008. For grants from prior years and for now-completed programs, see the annual reports section of this website.

Grants Database

Grantee
Amount
City
Year
  • grantee: University of Toronto
    amount: $260,640
    city: Toronto, Canada
    year: 2022

    To study collaboration between software engineers and researchers on scientific open source projects and to pilot interventions for sustained engagement in software production practices

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Shurui Zhou

    To study collaboration between software engineers and researchers on scientific open source projects and to pilot interventions for sustained engagement in software production practices

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  • grantee: University of Victoria
    amount: $103,740
    city: Victoria, Canada
    year: 2022

    To improve the quality of scientific software through better identification, management, and avoidance of technical debt

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Neil Ernst

    To improve the quality of scientific software through better identification, management, and avoidance of technical debt

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  • grantee: Superbloom Design
    amount: $238,554
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2022

    To conduct a landscape analysis of the user experience of open source research software projects

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Georgia Bullen

    To conduct a landscape analysis of the user experience of open source research software projects

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  • grantee: New Venture Fund
    amount: $50,000
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2022

    To support the Open Research Funders Group, a partnership committed to the open sharing of research outputs

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Heather Joseph

    To support the Open Research Funders Group, a partnership committed to the open sharing of research outputs

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  • grantee: North Carolina State University
    amount: $49,421
    city: Raleigh, NC
    year: 2022

    To partially support a series of convenings to develop models for data science consulting in higher education

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Rachel Levy

    To partially support a series of convenings to develop models for data science consulting in higher education

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  • grantee: American Geophysical Union
    amount: $366,850
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2022

    To support the design and development of a scholarly publishing workflow for computational notebooks

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Shelley Stall

    This grant supports the development of a publishing workflow for the computational notebooks used by researchers including the American Geophysical Union (AGU)’s community of earth and planetary scientists. Computational notebooks improve the interactivity, reproducibility, and reuse of journal articles by combining text, visualizations, and other elements into narrative documents, but until now they have primarily existed as supplementary materials to traditional journal articles. Grant funds will allow the AGU to to explore ways of integrating computational notebooks with publishing platforms by bringing together representatives from scientific societies, publishers, repositories, and federal agencies for a series of events, ultimately developing a workflow to preserve the interactivity of computational notebooks into their final publication.

    To support the design and development of a scholarly publishing workflow for computational notebooks

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  • grantee: Code for Science and Society
    amount: $399,823
    city: Portland, OR
    year: 2022

    To support and strengthen the community focused on the design, production, and maintenance of sustainable research software in the United States

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Karthik Ram

    As part of a set of connected activities under the banner of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI), this grant will support the hiring of a full-time URSSI community manager who will focus on cultivating and growing URSSI’s community while identifying new needs and potential collaborations, as well as providing support with engagement and dissemination activities. This new position will draw on expertise and support from Code for Science and Society and the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement, as well as PI Ram’s deep experience growing the rOpenSci community.  

    To support and strengthen the community focused on the design, production, and maintenance of sustainable research software in the United States

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  • grantee: Oregon State University
    amount: $410,000
    city: Corvallis, OR
    year: 2022

    To train researchers in effective and sustainable practices for developing research software

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Kyle Niemeyer

    As part of a set of connected activities under the banner of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute, this grant funds an effort by Kyle Niemeyer, mechanical engineering professor at Oregon State University, to develop and run four, weeklong “beyond introductory” winter/summer schools for researchers who want to deepen their software engineering skills. Beyond directly training an anticipated 130 scientific and engineering researchers in sustainable software development, Niemeyer will develop, hone, and release a scalable mid-level curriculum for the training of non-expert scientists in best practices in software engineering and his project will provide useful data on the size of demand for such skills training events.

    To train researchers in effective and sustainable practices for developing research software

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  • grantee: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
    amount: $350,000
    city: Champaign, IL
    year: 2022

    To collect and support the development of policies that foster sustainable research software

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Daniel Katz

    Software has been critical to research for decades, but only in the past handful of years has it become a topic of broad national conversations about the scientific enterprise. Much of this discussion has centered on the difficulties of maintaining research software beyond initial grant funding, especially when funder support has historically focused on new projects rather than maintenance of existing research infrastructure. Unlike instruments, research software is rarely commercialized, and “sustainability” usually relies on persistent, ongoing engagement by developers cross-subsidized by institutions and other grants.   As part of a set of connected activities under the banner of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute, this grant funds a project led by Daniel S. Katz at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to collect and analyze research software sustainability policies across a host of key institutions. Katz’s targets are guidelines, rules, and practices related to research software created by institutions such as universities, laboratories, and industry as well as the funders, professional societies, and publishers that exert strong influence on the norms of scientific practice. Katz will then use the collected policies to answer several important big picture questions about research software sustainability, including characterizing the variation of strategies and institutional structures for the support of research software, the alignment or misalignment of such strategies, and funding sources and opportunities for the maintenance of research software.

    To collect and support the development of policies that foster sustainable research software

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  • grantee: Berkeley Lab Foundation
    amount: $397,544
    city: Oakland, CA
    year: 2022

    To study the production and user experience of scientific software to develop a design system for scientific software user interfaces

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Better Software for Science
    • Investigator Lavanya Ramakrishnan

    In most contemporary software development, investments in user experience (UX) design are viewed as highly prudent expenditures that result in products that are intuitive, meaningful, and relevant for users. When it comes to scientific software projects, however, it’s rare to find a UX designer amongst any core set of contributors. Recent research on the topic suggests that greater investment in the UX of a piece of software (especially early in the lifecycle of a project) could have large positive downstream impacts: easier adoption of software, lowered barriers to its use by a broader set of scientists with different backgrounds and levels of training, diminishing maintenance costs, and healthy cycles of user feedback informing how to build more useful software.   This grant funds a project lead by Lavanya Ramakrishnan at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBL), to help codify how to effectively implement UX design in scientific software projects through the study of LBL’s extensive corpus of UX research on myriad scientific collaborations. Ramakrishnan’s team will use the research to generalize best practices for implementing UX into the development of a diverse typology of software types (i.e., data pipelines vs. instrument control systems), and then prototype a UX design system to be used for common scientific tasks and workflows.

    To study the production and user experience of scientific software to develop a design system for scientific software user interfaces

    More
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