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: Miller-McCune Center for Research Media and Public Policy
    amount: $50,000
    city: Santa Barbara, CA
    year: 2018

    To support travel by academic researchers to the 2019 Social Science Foo Camp

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Geane DeLima

    To support travel by academic researchers to the 2019 Social Science Foo Camp

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  • grantee: Code for Science and Society
    amount: $609,500
    city: Portland, OR
    year: 2018

    To support better use of spreadsheets in research through continued development of software that is user-friendly, designed to integrate with existing open tools and languages, customizable by discipline, and supportive of best practices in data management and computational reproducibility

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Nokome Bentley

    Stencila is a spreadsheet tool that enables researchers to execute Python, R, or SQL code from within individual cells alongside data and Excel-style formulae. The promise of a platform like Stencila is that it allows researchers who are comfortable in Excel to exploit the universe of disciplinary and statistical libraries in open source languages like Python and R without having to wholly embrace a different way of working. Funds from this grant support efforts by New Zealand–based scientist Nokome Bentley to expand the power and user base of Stencila. Plans involve identification of and outreach to researchers most likely to find Stencila useful, the implementation of several new features designed to ease adoption of the platform, the further growth of a community of committed open source developers, and efforts to diversify the project’s funding base.

    To support better use of spreadsheets in research through continued development of software that is user-friendly, designed to integrate with existing open tools and languages, customizable by discipline, and supportive of best practices in data management and computational reproducibility

    More
  • grantee: Johns Hopkins University
    amount: $536,063
    city: Baltimore, MD
    year: 2018

    To support the adoption of the SciServer research data platform by new scientific communities

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Alexander Szalay

    Adapted from SkyServer, the data portal for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SciServer is an open source data management and archiving platform aimed at meeting the data management needs of large research collaborations at a disciplinary or interdisciplinary scope. These collaborations often have unique data management challenges anchored to a particular instrument, facility, type of data, or field campaign that are unmet by archiving and management platforms built to serve as generic data archiving platforms. SciServer, in contrast, is built to integrate datasets and lower barriers to aggregate querying and analysis. Funds from this grant provide one year of operating support for SciServer as the project’s founder, Alexander Szalay, seeks to diversify and stabilize the platform’s funding base.

    To support the adoption of the SciServer research data platform by new scientific communities

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  • grantee: New York University
    amount: $186,897
    city: New York, NY
    year: 2018

    To investigate how academics are using Git hosting platforms and how those platforms can be better adapted to academic needs

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator David Millman

    The grant funds work by a team at the NYU Libraries including David Millman, director of Digital Library Technology Services, and Vicky Steeves, reproducibility librarian, to examine how researchers use the popular code versioning site Github and its underlying technology platform Git. The team will document the ways in which current Git-based systems are incompletely serving the needs of academic researchers and libraries during the software design process. This will include a gap analysis, landscape research, user study, and development of functional requirements to improve Git from the standpoint of academic research. The result will be a set of recommendations to more overtly align Git platforms with academic institutions and incentive structures.

    To investigate how academics are using Git hosting platforms and how those platforms can be better adapted to academic needs

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  • grantee: SUNY Polytechnic Institute
    amount: $197,851
    city: Albany, NY
    year: 2018

    To support the scaling-up of a community of scholars and practitioners focused on technology maintenance

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Andrew Russell

    In 2016, Andrew Russell (now Professor and Dean of Arts & Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute) and Lee Vinsel (now Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech) hosted a three-day workshop, “The Maintainers,” held at the Stevens Institute for Technology, that included presentations from a handful of practitioners who were responsible for maintenance of technological infrastructure such as aerospace, transportation, information technology, and the military. Interest in the workshop was robust and a second workshop followed in 2017, also well attended. This grant provides support to Russell and Vinsel for plans to grow and formalize the set of experts, researchers, and practitioners interested in issues of technological maintenance. Over the next year they request funds to develop two pilot “maintenance communities,” one of “information maintainers” and the other of “maintainers in the workforce.” Through these two pilot communities Russell and Vinsel hope to produce a blueprint for how maintainer communities might be effectively structured. Additional grant funds support preparatory work in advance of a 2019 Maintainers conference.

    To support the scaling-up of a community of scholars and practitioners focused on technology maintenance

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  • grantee: University of Washington
    amount: $420,815
    city: Seattle, WA
    year: 2018

    To improve the capacity of data infrastructures to provide access to and sharing of sensitive qualitative data

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Nicholas Weber

    The conversation around data privacy and what constitutes appropriate access to sensitive data for research purposes has generally focused on quantitative data. Social scientists who work in whole or part with qualitative data have largely been left out of the data privacy conversation, and platforms for archiving ethnographic, interview, video, and other qualitative data haven’t yet engaged issues of cross-study search or analysis. This grant funds a two-year study led by Nic Weber and Carole Palmer of the University of Washington School of Library and Information of the privacy dimensions of qualitative research data. The project aims to produce a set of functional and technical specifications that will enable appropriate access to and sharing of qualitative data. Weber and Palmer will gather a broad set of use cases from both research case studies and scenario-focused interviews, which will then inform the initial design of a data curation protocol that ensures the contextual integrity of sensitive data collections and enhances the propensity of sensitive data to be reused. That protocol will then be implemented in both a tool for researchers to easily generate structured provenance metadata for sensitive qualitative data and a set of functional and technical requirements that will be piloted at Syracuse University’s Qualitative Data Repository.

    To improve the capacity of data infrastructures to provide access to and sharing of sensitive qualitative data

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  • grantee: University of California, Office of the President
    amount: $20,000
    city: Oakland, CA
    year: 2018

    To support a workshop exploring institutional workflows to enable access, preservation, and sharing of sensitive data

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Guenter Waibel

    To support a workshop exploring institutional workflows to enable access, preservation, and sharing of sensitive data

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  • grantee: Hopewell Fund
    amount: $20,000
    city: Washington, DC
    year: 2018

    To partially support a second summit of data science leadership across US universities

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Micaela Parker

    To partially support a second summit of data science leadership across US universities

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  • grantee: Johns Hopkins University
    amount: $19,124
    city: Baltimore, MD
    year: 2018

    To develop a framework for updating the Digital Curation Centre Curation Lifecycle Model

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator G. Choudhury

    To develop a framework for updating the Digital Curation Centre Curation Lifecycle Model

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  • grantee: Code for Science and Society
    amount: $34,300
    city: Portland, OR
    year: 2018

    To partially support the production of a handbook on best practices for open source academic software communities

    • Program Technology
    • Sub-program Data & Computational Research
    • Investigator Danielle Robinson

    To partially support the production of a handbook on best practices for open source academic software communities

    More
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