In this conversation, Adam Falk and I talk about running research programs with impact over long timescales, creating new fields, philanthropic science funding, and so much more. 

Adam is the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,  which was started by the eponymous founder of General Motors and has been funding science and education efforts for almost nine decades. 

They've funded everything from iPython Notebooks to the Wikimedia foundation to an astronomical survey of the entire sky. If you're like me, their name is familiar from the acknowledgement part of PBS science shows.

Before becoming the president of the Sloan Foundation, Adam was the president of Williams College and a high energy physicist focused on elementary particle physics and quantum field theory. His combined experience in research, academic administration, and philanthropic funding give him a unique and fascinating perspective on the innovation ecosystem. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. 

Links

- The Sloan Foundation
- Adam Falk on Wikipedia 
- Philanthropy and the Future of Science and Technology

Highlight Timestamps

- How do you measure success in science? [00:01:31 ]

- Thinking about programs on long timescales [00:05:27 ]

-  How does the Sloan Foundation decide which programs to do? [00:08:08 ]

- Sloan's Matter to Life Program [00:12:54 ]

-  How does the Sloan Foundation think about coordination? [00:18:24 ]

-  Finding and incentivizing program directors [00:22:32 ]

- What should academics know about the funding world and what should the funding world know about academics? [00:28:03 ]

- Grants and academics as the primary way research happens [00:33:42 ]

- Problems with grants and common grant applications [00:44:49 ]

- Addressing the criticism of philanthropy being inefficient because it lacks market mechanisms [00:47:16 ]

- Engaging with the idea that people who create value should be able to capture that value [00:53:05 ]

 

Transcript

[00:00:35 ]

In this conversation, Adam Falk, and I talk about running research programs with impact over long timescales, creating new fields, philanthropic science funding, and so much more. Adam is the president of the Alfred P Sloan foundation, which was started by the eponymous founder of general motors. And has been funding science and education efforts for almost nine decades. They funded everything from IP.

I fond [00:01:35 ] notebooks to Wikimedia foundation. To an astronomical survey of the entire sky. If you're like me, their name is familiar from the acknowledgement part of PBS science shows. Before becoming the president of the Sloan foundation. Adam was the president of Williams college and I high energy physicist focused on elementary particle physics in quantum field theory.

His combined experience in research. Uh, Academic administration and philanthropic funding give him a unique and fascinating perspective on the innovation ecosystem i hope you enjoy this as much as i did

[00:02:06 ] Ben: Let's start with like a, sort of a really tricky thing that I'm, I'm myself always thinking about is that, you know, it's really hard to like measure success in science, right?

Like you, you know, this better than anybody. And so just like at, at the foundation, how do you, how do you think about success? Like, what is, what does success look like? What is the difference between. Success and failure mean to

[00:02:34 ] Adam: you? [00:02:35 ] I mean, I think that's a, that's a really good question. And I think it's a mistake to think that there are some magic metrics that if only you are clever enough to come up with build them out of citations and publications you could get some fine tune measure of success.

I mean, obviously if we fund in a scientific area, we're funding investigators who we think are going to have a real impact with their work individually, and then collectively. And so of course, you know, if they're not publishing, it's a failure. We expect them to publish. We expect people to publish in high-impact journals, but we look for broader measures as well if we fund a new area.

So for example, A number of years ago, we had a program in the microbiology of the built environment, kind of studying all the microbes that live in inside, which turns out to be a very different ecosystem than outside. When we started in that program, there were a few investigators interested in this question.

There weren't a lot of tools that were good for studying it. [00:03:35 ] By 10 years later, when we'd left, there was a journal, there were conferences, there was a community of people who were doing this work, and that was another measure, really tangible measure of success that we kind of entered a field that, that needed some support in order to get going.

And by the time we got out, it was, it was going strong and the community of people doing that work had an identity and funding paths and a real future. Yeah.

[00:04:01 ] Ben: So I guess one way that I've been thinking about it, it's just, it's almost like counterfactual impact. Right. Whereas like if you hadn't gone in, then it, the, it wouldn't be

[00:04:12 ] Adam: there.

Yeah. I think that's the way we think about it. Of course that's a hard to, to measure. Yeah. But I think that Since a lot of the work we fund is not close to technology, right. We don't have available to ourselves, you know, did we spin out products? Did we spin out? Companies did a lot of the things that might directly connect that work to, [00:04:35 ] to activities that are outside of the research enterprise, that in other fields you can measure impact with.

So the impact is pretty internal. That is for the most part, it is, you know, Has it been impact on other parts of science that, you know, again, that we think might not have happened if we hadn't hadn't funded what we funded. As I said before, have communities grown up another interesting measure of impact from our project that we funded for about 25 years now, the Sloan digital sky survey is in papers published in the following sense that one of the innovations, when the Sloan digital sky survey launched in the early.

Was that the data that came out of it, which was all for the first time, digital was shared broadly with the community. That is, this was a survey of the night sky that looked at millions of objects. So they're very large databases. And the investigators who built this, the, the built the, the, the telescope certainly had first crack at analyzing that [00:05:35 ] data.

But there was so much richness in the data that the decision was made at. Sloan's urging early on that this data after a year should be made public 90% of the publications that came out of the Sloan digital sky survey have not come from collaborators, but it come from people who use that data after it's been publicly released.

Yeah. So that's another way of kind of seeing impact and success of a project. And it's reached beyond its own borders.

[00:06:02 ] Ben: And you mentioned like both. Just like that timescale, right? Like that, that, that 25 years something that I think is just really cool about the Sloan foundation is like how, how long you've been around and sort of like your capability of thinking on those on like a quarter century timescale.

And I guess, how do you, how do you think about timescales on things? Right. Because it's like, on the one hand, this is like, obviously like science can take [00:06:35 ] 25 years on the other hand, you know, it's like, you need to be, you can't just sort of like do nothing for 25 years.

[00:06:44 ] Adam: So if you had told people back in the nineties that the Sloan digital sky survey was going to still be going after a quarter of a century, they probably never would have funded it.

So, you know, I think that That you have an advantage in the foundation world, as opposed to the the, the federal funding, which is that you can have some flexibility about the timescales on what you think. And so you don't have to simply go from grant to grant and you're not kind of at the mercy of a Congress that changes its own funding commitments every couple of years.

We at the Sloan foundation tend to think that it takes five years at a minimum to have impact into any new field that you go into it. And we enter a new science field, you know, as we just entered, we just started a new program matter to life, which we can talk about. [00:07:35 ] That's initially a five-year commitment to put about $10 million a year.

Into this discipline, understanding that if things are going well, we'll re up for another five years. So we kind of think of that as a decadal program. And I would say the time scale we think on for programs is decades. The timescale we think of for grants is about three years, right? But a program itself consists of many grants may do a large number of investigators.

And that's really the timescale where we think you can have, have an impact over that time. But we're constantly re-evaluating. I would say the timescale for rethinking a program is shorter. That's more like five years and we react. So in our ongoing programs, about every five years, we'll take a step back and do a review.

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