Funds from this grant provide continued operating support to the New York Genome Center (NYGC) in its efforts to strengthen and diversify the bioinformatics community in New York City. Sloan funds will support the NYGC’s plans to develop new infrastructure, methods, and training that it expects will catalyze research insights, empower researchers with new bioinformatics capabilities, and continue to solidify New York City as a genomics and life sciences hub. Over the next three years, the NYGC will continue to develop its bioinformatics capabilities in support of its member institutions, develop a shared computing facility with access to public data sets and state-of-the-art data analysis pipelines, craft new algorithms and techniques in bioinformatics, and train biological and medical researchers in core bioinformatics skills through training courses and in-person and virtual educational sessions. Expected outputs include peer-reviewed publications, updated software packages, a bioinformatics commons and genomic data warehouse, and the training of 50 researchers per year.

This grant supports the continued operation and administration of InsideSchools.org, a public website that provides comprehensive information on New York City’s 1,700 public schools, including photos and videos of the school, student achievement statistics, course offerings, and reviews compiled by independent reviewers from on-site visits. Grant funds provide three years of core operational support as well as planned efforts to improve the site’s search capabilities and accessibility via smartphones and other mobile devices. In addition, the grant provides resources to help the site develop and implement plans for long-term financial sustainability.  

Funds from this grant support an initiative by the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) to expand the number of NYC metro area institutions involved in educating undergraduates to become data scientists and data science–enabled professionals. Over the next four years, BHEF will convene and support the NYC Data Science Task Force of approximately 40 representatives from academic institutions, corporations, cultural and research organizations, and government agencies; convene two working groups, one aimed at mapping the skills, competencies, and knowledge needed for data scientists and one on developing a repository of undergraduate data science curricular resources; partner with NYC institutions to create data-science-focused courses, concentrations, and minors; work with industry partners to create high-quality internships and other student work experiences in data science and create guidelines and best practices for the creation of these experiences; and disseminate lessons learned to the broader educational community.  

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) estimates that more than 1,000 restaurant-associated outbreaks of foodborne illness occur in the city each year. Outbreaks are usually reported by the victims themselves via telephone calls to 311 or the health department. Most victims don’t bother, however, and as a result the DOHMH detects only about 30 outbreaks each year. Since quickly detecting foodborne illness outbreaks is critical to implementing control measures in time to protect the public, better detection measures are needed. This grant funds a project by the Fund for the City of New York, in collaboration with the DOHMH and researchers at Columbia University to experiment with using Twitter and other social media to detect unreported instances of restaurant-related foodborne illness. The theory is that while people may be unlikely to report a foodborne illness to the health department, they are much more likely to tweet or post to Facebook about it. Real-time analysis of public data from Twitter and other social media sites may be able to reliably inform health department officials of outbreaks as they are happening. Over the next three years, the FCNY team will develop algorithmic methods for searching Twitter feeds, identifying tweets potentially relevant to foodborne illness outbreaks in NYC, and then evaluate the reliability of those algorithms in detecting actual outbreaks. Additional grant funds support efforts to increase voluntary reports of foodborne illness outbreaks by allowing NYC residents to report illness directly through Twitter. The project is experimental, but the prospective gains are large. Even a small increase in the ability to detect restaurant-related foodborne illness outbreaks would represent a significant improvement of current detection capabilities.

Each year since 1973, the Sloan Public Service Awards have recognized six outstanding civil servants out of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for New York City government. The Fund for the City of New York manages the nomination and selection process and refers to the awards as “the Nobel Prizes of Government…, the highest award that can be bestowed upon a New York City public servant.” Nominated by their colleagues and selected by a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished New Yorkers, each of the six winners receives a $10,000 cash prize and is honored at individual celebrations at their workplaces and at a city-wide celebration presided over by the Mayor. This grant provides three years of continued support for the Sloan Public Service Awards.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the administration of the Sloan Teaching Champion Awards, an annual awards program run by the Council for Economic Education that recognizes outstanding financial and economics education by secondary school teachers in the New York City metropolitan area. Winners are selected by an independent committee based on a number of diverse factors, including their effectiveness, creativity, and success in motivating underserved students. Winners receive a $5,000 cash prize, $2,500 to be used to augment economic education programs at their respective schools, and are honored at a high-profile event in New York City.