Carnegie Mellon University, one of the six film schools with whom the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has an ongoing partnership, has announced its latest crop of screenwriting grantees. These grants fund further development of each science or technology-based screenplay, two of which are features and one of which is a series pilot. Traditionally, three projects are recognized but a rich pool of promising scripts resulted in ties for both second place and third place, resulting in a set of five new Sloan grantees. Read more about these exciting new works below.

FIRST PLACE ($20,000):

SLEDHEAD by Ellie Melick
When her cousin — and hero — loses a long battle with mental illness, U.S.A. Skeleton athlete Ingrid Anderson puts her Olympic dreams on the line to help neurological researchers investigate how sliding sports damage the brain.

SECOND PLACE (TIE) ($10,000 EACH):

BITE by EmElise Knapp
When Daria Harding's Broadnose Sevengill shark research is under attack, she must adapt like the very species she is trying to protect. Daria has two choices: Swim away and abandon years of dedicated discovery, or bite back.

ODE TO JOPLIN by Hannah Honey Shepard
National Weather Service Meteorologist Maggie Guthrie must confront her estranged family when she returns home to Joplin, Missouri to survey the damage of the 2011 EF5 tornado. Can a brush with death bring new perspective, and repair the relationship of a broken southern evangelical family?

THIRD PLACE (TIE) ($5,000 EACH):

BENEATH THE SURFACE by Kate Isabel Foley
Unmoored by the sudden death of her younger sister, analytical chemist Nessa Brodie must reckon with her grief in order to make sense of the corpses she faces every day in her work at the Virginia “body farm” — and to find her big breakthrough before funding runs out.

MOTHER BEAR by Sondai NaNaBuluku
Malakai, a grief-stricken fish-out-of-water from Florida, is confronted by the plight of arctic-related climate change in Churchill, Manitoba. Here, he must aid a team of Polar Bears International researchers in the hope that tagging regional polar bears will heal the environment and himself.

• Sloan Film Update: New Winners from Carnegie Mellon University
• New Sloan Grantees at CMU
• Meet the Filmmaker: Dan Giles