The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced grants totaling $21 million in support of efforts to unlock new types of knowledge and catalyze data-driven scientific discoveries.

Through its $60 million Data-Driven Discovery initiative, the Palo Alto-based foundation awarded unrestricted five-year grants to fifteen researchers working in areas such as high-energy astrophysics, genomics, wildlife ecology, mathematics, computer science, and computational biology. As part of the initiative, the foundation also is partnering with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and three universities on a $37.8 million effort to create dedicated data science environments where researchers can collaborate to advance data-intensive scientific discoveries.

Grant recipients include Jeffrey Heer of the University of Washington's Interactive Data Lab, who investigates the perceptual, cognitive, and social factors involved in making sense of large data sets; Laurel Larsen of the University of California, Berkeley's Environmental Systems Dynamics Laboratory, who studies how the flow of water through the environment influences landscapes and ecosystems; and Blair D. Sullivan of North Carolina State University, whose work focuses on transforming techniques from theoretical computer science into practical, scalable tools for graph analysis.

"Many areas of science are currently data-rich but discovery-poor," said Vicki Chandler, chief program officer for science at the Moore Foundation. "The Moore Investigator Awards in Data-Driven Discovery aim to reverse that trend by enabling researchers to harness the unprecedented diversity of scientific data now available and answer new kinds of questions. We hope that other funders, public and private, will join us in supporting this transformation."

For a complete list of the grant recipients, visit the Moore Foundation website.