Administered by the Council for Economic Education (CEE), the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards recognize excellent high school economics teachers from the New York metropolitan area. The candidates are selected annually based on their effectiveness, creativity, and ability to motivate underserved students. Three winning teachers receive a cash award of $5,000, and their schools each receive $2,500 to support economics education. Honorees are recognized at the CEE’s Visionary Awards dinner, which is attended by academic and practicing economists as well as business and civic leaders. Funds from this grant support administration of the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards for two years. Additional funds support a series of activities by CEE aimed at strengthening economic education in the New York metropolitan area, including six professional development workshops for economics teachers, a three-day teacher boot camp, a pilot program to test innovative economics curricula, and outreach efforts to increase participation.

Most of the advances in microbiology over the past 15 years have focused on bacteria and, to a lesser extent, on archaea and viruses. Protists (microbial eukaryotes), on the other hand, are relatively unstudied, in part because their genomes are large, complex, and poorly represented in the reference genome collections. Funds from this grant support work by Professor Jane Carlton, a leading protist metagenomic expert, to conduct a pilot project to discover protists in pets and pests in all five boroughs of New York City. Carlton will team up with researchers at Fordham University, Barnard College, Hunter College, and the Department of Environmental Protection to collect samples from 20 cats, 20 dogs, 20 rats, 20 mice, 20 cockroaches, and 20 pigeons from each of the five boroughs of New York City, for a total of 600 samples. The team will then use wet-lab methods and computational pipelines to characterize protists found in sewage collected from 14 NYC treatment plants, which service the five NYC boroughs. These data will then be used to amplify and characterize the 18S rRNA marker gene from the pet and pest samples to characterize community diversity and look for associations between the protists found in sewage and the pets and pests that harbor them. The overarching goal is to develop and demonstrate the viability of methods to reliably discover protists in host organisms.

The BioBus is a fully mobile research lab that visit schools and public science events in New York City. Outfitted with state-of-the-art microscopes and run by a diverse team of young scientists, the BioBus is a mobile science field trip where students can use a phase-contrast video microscope to make movies of crawling amoeba, use a scanning electron microscope to image a fly eye, or use a fluorescing microscope to see glowing, streaming plant chloroplast. In 2014, the BioBus visited 88 K-12 schools in New York City, bringing high-quality, engaging education to some 16,000 students, 57 percent of whom were African-American or Latino. Funds from this grant support the continued operation and expansion of BioBus. Over the next three years, Cell Motion Laboratories, the parent organization of the BioBus, will build another BioBus mobile lab and, in partnership with Columbia University, build a “BioBase” community lab in Harlem, which will allow students to continue their educational experiences once the BioBus has moved locations, and expand its educational offerings to underserved students in Harlem.