The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) has been the Foundation's longtime partner in its grantmaking in the Education for Underrepresented Groups program, administering both the Sloan Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. NACME receives applications from 53 departments at the 34 universities participating in these programs, selects students for scholarships, administers awards, and supports recruitment efforts by faculty. The grant funds new obligations in these programs for the 2012-2013 academic year, including scholarships, recruiting support, and administrative costs.

The grants funds a project by a team led by University of Michigan economist Matthew Shapiro, who will analyze an exciting new dataset to glean insights about the economic behavior of older Americans. Shapiro and his team will analyze member data provided by Pageonce, a firm that has developed a mobile phone app that lets users pay bills online as well as integrate disparate bank accounts, credit card balances, and investment accounts all in one place. Analyzing the Pageonce data, the team will focus on what it can tell us about how older workers spend and save, how they handle debt, and how saving and consumption decisions change after retirement.

Funds from this grant support the work of Nichole Maestas of the Rand Corporation, who is studying how changes in labor demand affects the employment outcomes of older workers. In earlier work, Maestas has catalogued how older workers often "unretire", re-entering the workforce after a previous exit. Some 60 percent of such workers who unretire end up changing occupations, moving from managerial and professional work to positions in sales, administration, and service provision, positions that are often part-time or offer more flexible scheduling opportunities. Maestas will look at existing datasets to understand the extent to which this phenomenon can be explained by changes in the labor demand for such positions, looking at how growth in industries with large proportions of sales, administrative or service jobs, and the subsequent increase in the demand for workers to fill these jobs, explains employment outcomes for older workers.

Fewer than a quarter of workers age 50 and older who lost their jobs between mid-2008 and the end of 2009 found work within 12 months, a rate much lower than for younger workers in similar circumstances. What explains this? Is it age discrimination? Bias against time spent unemployed? Local labor market conditions? This grant supports efforts by three labor economists, Daniel Silverman of the University of Michigan, Henry Farber of Princeton, and Till von Wachter of Columbia, to partly answer these questions by conducting a unique experiment that may advance our understanding of how the prospects of older worker re-employment are affected by time unemployed, tightness of local labor markets, and differences in job history. Silverman and the rest of the team will send out to employers some 12,000 pairs of job applications for a mythical unemployed older worker. The faux applications will be identical except for the length of time the applicant has been unemployed, and Silverman and his team will subsequently record the rate at which the applications receive a positive callback from employers, allowing them to estimate how the duration of unemployment affects the possibility of being re-hired. The team will field applications in a number of different labor markets, and will vary the job histories of applicants, which should yield additional insights into how labor market conditions and prior work experience affect the re-employment aspects of workers over 50.

How do recessions in general, and the Great Recession in particular, impact older workers? Are older workers more or less likely to be laid off in recessions? If they are laid off, how long are they out of the labor force and are they eventually able to find new jobs? If they find new jobs, are they at the same or substantially lower pay? To what extent are unemployed older Americans effectively forced into early retirement? These are important questions that have real economic consequences for a significant portion of the labor market. This grant to Dartmouth College supports a project by Alan Gustman, Tom Steinmeier, and Nahid Tabatabai, to specify and estimate a structural retirement model to answer questions about how recessions, including the Great Recession of 2007-2009, affect the labor market activities and retirement of the older population, aged 50 and above. Working with data from the highly-regarded, longitudinal Health and Retirement Study, Gustman and his team will analyze the direct effects of recessions on work responses to layoffs and reduced market activities, as well as indirect effects from wealth losses and induced changes in health and disability status. Factors to be included in their analysis include changes in wealth, incentives from pensions and Social Security, spousal behavior, and the influence of key regulatory policies, including unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and the early claiming of Social Security benefits.

Funds from this grant to National Public Radio will support the expansion and improvement of business and economics coverage on Planet Money. Supported activities include the hiring of new Planet Money staff, production of twice monthly segments on economic issues for both Morning Edition and All Things Considered, two of NPR's most popular shows, and the creation of a set of "explainers" that explicate key economic concepts like inflation and GDP. Additional monies will support the expansion of Planet Money's online activities and outreach, funding the creation of a Planet Money iPhone and iPad app, and allowing the creation of a multimedia content team that will focus on bringing Planet Money stories to an online audience. Additional funds from this grant provide core support to the NPR science desk.

This grant will fund a project by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to evaluate the impact of the Foundation's Minority Ph.D. program. NORC will survey faculty at all 53 departments participating in the Minority Ph.D. program as well as all currently-enrolled graduate students supported through the program, and will attempt to track down and survey every former participant of these departments (whether with Ph.D. in hand or not) to determine what they did after their first job and where they are now. NORC will also track and survey Sloan-funded Ph.D. recipients from departments that once but no longer participate in the Minority Ph.D. program. NORC will then analyze these surveys to provide a complete picture of the career outcomes of all Ph.D. graduates who had received some part of their fellowship funding from Sloan. The output of this project will contribute to the evaluation of and improvements to the structure and performance of the Minority Ph.D. program.

In March of 2003, director and longtime diving enthusiast James Cameron piloted a specially designed submarine, the Deepsea Challenger, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench - the deepest point in the ocean, becoming only the second man in history to make the journey. Spending some nine hours at the bottom of the ocean, Cameron captured the entire incredible journey on film, including never before seen images the trench floor. Funds from this grant will support the production of three separate media projects related to Cameron's pioneering dive, a 90-minute 3D feature film, a two-hour television documentary, and a 40-minute 3D film designed for oversized screens. Additional funds will support the production of educational resources to complement the film's scientific content, as well as digital and media outreach activities.

This grant supports the production of a three-hour NOVA special, Making of North America, which takes a unique "biographical" approach to communicating facts about the geological and geographic history of the continent. Making of North America will put to use the work of two new graphics projects, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Transparent Earth and Time Tunnel, to take the audience on a three-billion year adventure and "detective story." Scientists on the program will try to solve mysteries such as what is raising the Rockies and what is fueling the "hot spot" in the middle of the continent while taking a fresh look at landmarks like the Grand Canyon. The three hours will include a first program, Primeval Forces; a second hour, The Birth of North America; and a final show, The Human Landscape. The series will be augmented with enhanced digital content, most notably a mobile interactive map available on multiple platforms and a Google Earth tour. Funds will also support the development of a suite of teaching resources and a science cafй toolkit to attract younger audiences.

Funds from this grant provide operational support for the launch of the New York Genome Center, a pioneering New York City-based research facility that will conduct both its own genomic research as well as provide genetic sequencing, analysis, and other services to research institutions in the New York metropolitan area. A model in collaborative research, the center will allow participating institutions to have access to first class genomic analysis capabilities without having to buy and maintain their own equipment, rent lab space, and retain expensive staff. Eleven of the City's most prominent research institutions have signed on to the effort, including Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Columbia, Cornell, and NYU; and Memorial Sloan Kettering, New York Presbyterian, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine among others. The development of a major new research center promises to catapult New York into the center of the dynamic and rapidly growing field of genomics.