As countries around the world consider building their first nuclear power plant, they must inevitably consider the question of what will happen to the used or "spent" nuclear fuel that will come out of these reactors. An attractive option, especially for countries that are small or that will have only a small number of nuclear power plants, is to work cooperatively with other countries to create a regional spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste repository, thus sharing among a set of partner countries the high costs of such a facility. Since 2009, the Foundation has provided funds to the Arius Association to enable them to promote the regional repository approach in the Arabian Gulf-Middle East region and in South East Asia. Several countries in each of these regions are committed to launching nuclear power programs. Funds from this grant will provide support to Arias for the continuation of these efforts. During that time they will help plan and provide the intellectual backing for two regional meetings. The United Arab Emirates will host an Arabian Gulf-Middle East meeting; and the International Atomic Energy Agency will host a South East Asia meeting. By the end of the two-year grant period, Arius aims to facilitate the creation of multinational working groups considering the desirability and feasibility of creating regional repositories in each of these regions. Working with partner countries and the IAEA, Arius will draft the technical and legal documents needed to make this possible. They will also publish at least one article in a major international magazine that explains and publicizes their work on regional repositories and showcases their progress.

The shift to digitally-mediated forms of scholarship has been characterized by a substantial growth in channels for and diversity of scholarly work. We see this in the flourishing of content in preprint servers and rapid- publication channels like arXiv, PLoS ONE, and the Social Science Research Network alongside unconventional forms of scholarly communication like research blogs and personal websites, all of which enable scholars to put their work out for broad access. Part of the Foundation's emerging strategy to ease this transition is to support the development of new models of filtering and curating online scholarly materials. This three-year grant supports the work of Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM) in the development of a software platform that will enable professional societies and interdisciplinary networks of scholars to collectively organize and review relevant resources. Cohen and Scheinfeldt will undertake a detailed study of various models for aggregating scholarly content, as well as a broad landscape survey of new and changing techniques for managing content on the "open web." In addition to contributing to the general body of knowledge about collective information filtering systems, this research will also directly inform the development of CHNM's "PressForward" platform, a substantial modification of the popular "Wordpress" blogging application that will enable the aggregation and curation of online scholarly resources at both an editorial and community level. Funds from this grant also support the experimental expansion of PressForward, currently powering DigitalHumanitiesNow.org, into four additional scholarly disciplines.

Babies are born sterile. The microbial ecosystem that thrives on and inside each of us-stomach bacteria that help us digest food, for instance-are acquired post-birth, presumably through contact with our mothers. But what of babies born prematurely, separated from their mothers, and treated in sterile neonatal intensive care units? How do these infants acquire the microbes needed to survive outside the womb? This grant supports the research of UC, Berkeley professor Jill Banfield, who is investigating this very question. In a one-year pilot study with collaborator Dr. Michael Morowitz of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Banfield will examine the microbial profiles of the air, water, and surfaces of a neonatal intensive care unit and compare the profiles to those found in the gut of three premature infants staying in the ICU. Using modern molecular tools, the research team will analyze the microbial profiles of the neonatal intensive care unit environments over time and space to potentially identify the sources of microbes involved in infant gut colonization.

Funds from this three-year grant will support activities by Film Independent to develop science-themed film scripts and assist production teams developing science-themed feature films. Grant funds will primarily support two ongoing programs at Film Independent: the Sloan Producer's Grant program, which chooses one science script each year and develops it through a seven-week course of mentorship so that the project emerges with a realistic budget, schedule, and business plan; and the Fast Track program, which chooses exceptional science-themed film projects that are ready for financing and exposes them to more than 60 film financiers, production companies, and other industry professionals during an intensive series of meetings held at the Los Angeles Film festival. Also supported through this grant is an annual reception hosted by Film Independent at the Filmmaker Forum of the Director's Guild of America, where Sloan supported writers and directors are given special exposure to some 400 influential filmmakers and industry professionals.

Funds from this grant support a project by Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley Law School to develop practical solutions to the obstacles copyright law places in the way of the implementation of digital library initiatives. Samuelson and her research team will address several thorny issues, including orphan works, private ordering, collective licensing, digital lending, and metadata ownership, in an effort to develop fair and practical procedures for the successful implementation of library initiatives that seek to realize the full potential of digital libraries. Over two years, funds from this grant will support several white papers, workshops and conferences, and the crafting of model legislation. The work of Samuelson's team will also help inform the continued development of the Foundation-supported Digital Public Library of America.

One of the objectives of our small program focusing on student retention in STEM disciplines at the undergraduate and graduate levels is to encourage universities to obtain and pay attention to data on the migration of their own students into and out of STEM disciplines. In the absence of such data, which most universities do not have, many campuses are either unaware of or ignore high net out-migration of students from their STEM departments. The result is wasted resources, underutilized faculty and facilities, and, depending on why students leave these disciplines, disappointed educational aspirations. Funds from this grant support a project by the American Society for Engineering Education to collect and report data on completion rates and time-to-degree in undergraduate engineering programs. Initial data collection will begin in the summer of 2012 with ASEE inviting all 380 U.S. engineering schools to participate. Data will be published in aggregate form, reporting separately on public and private institutions; schools that accept students as freshmen, sophomores, or juniors; and transfer and non-transfer students. The collected information will provide a rich dataset for scholarly analysis of student flows into and out of engineering.

This two-year grant to Yale University provides support to Professors Bill Nazaroff and Jordan Peccia to continue their ongoing work characterizing airborne microbial populations of indoor environments. The team will study the size distributions of bioaerosols from the indoor environment under occupied and unoccupied conditions. They will examine the sources, origins, and population characteristics of airborne bacteria and fungi in indoor settings that are attributable to human occupancy and collect and analyze air and dust samples from 10 different indoor environments-all elementary schools in the U.S., Germany, and China. Collected samples will help shed light on how airborne bacteria and fungi differ from other airborne particulate matter, how internal physical processes in indoor environments shape bacterial and fungal size distributions, and the role human occupants play in shaping microbial populations in indoor air.

This two-year grant will support an ambitious research agenda spearheaded by Dr. Keith Seifert of the University of Ottowa, and Dr. Robert Samson of the Dutch Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures to use advanced DNA sequencing technology to further advance our understanding of fungi and the role they play in the microbial ecosystems of indoor environments. Supported activities include the analysis of more than 6,000 new fungal cultures to provide detailed DNA sequence and taxonomic information, which Seifert and Samson expect to result in the discovery of 50 to 100 new species of fungi. In addition, Seifert and Samson will conduct further research on identifying regions of fungal DNA that can be appropriately used for species identification, as the current DNA region used for identification is effective in distinguishing only 72% of known fungal species. Funds from this grant will also support the education and training of one graduate student and two postdoctoral fellows.

Different parts of the body have different microbial profiles. The microorganisms that thrive in our underarms are different from those that live on our hands, which are different, in turn, from those that live on our scalp. Funds from this grant support a project by the University of Chicago's Jack Gilbert to investigate how these unique microbial profiles interact with the microbial populations of surfaces in the indoor environment. Gilbert will examine the microbial profiles associated with the dominant hand, the gut, and heel pad from 20 individuals in 10 homes. He will then compare these profiles to those found on door knobs, kitchen surfaces, bedroom and bathroom floors, and light switches following a move into a new home. These profiles will be examined every day for two weeks prior to moving and four weeks after moving to a new home, shedding light on whether the microbes found on people are transferred to the surfaces of their homes and, if so, whether the transferred microbes thrive in the new environments they find themselves in.

The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) acts as the Foundation's agent in administering the Sloan Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. NACME receives applications from eligible students, awards Sloan scholarships, sends checks to students, receives and monitors students' reports on their spending and their academic progress, interacts regularly with the faculty who are key to our programs' success, disburses funds to participating university campuses and departments to help them with recruitment and retention activities, monitors the spending of these funds, maintains the database for these Foundation programs, and performs analysis of these data. This grant to NACME funds the administrative costs associated with these activities for the next three years.