Public expenditures on scientific research have a key role in the promotion of discovery and innovation. Yet the way in which these investments work their way through to these goals remains largely a black box, because so little is known about the project teams supported by the funding. However, regional effects of major research organizations are widely attributed to the people who work on research projects; as J. Robert Oppenheimer once said, “the best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person." The lack of evidence about the contribution of people on project teams to discovery and innovation is largely due to the lack of data; for example, a recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) report on the biomedical workforce noted that members were “frustrated and sometimes stymied” by the quality of the data available. This panel describes the results of projects that have filled that gap by using data on grants to identify who is supported by research funding. This includes not only chief investigators but also individuals on research teams, including graduate and undergraduate students as well as postdocs. The data are drawn from the STAR METRICS data in the United States, the parallel ASTRA project in Australia, and HELIOS in France. The symposium will present results of statistical analyses that go beyond simply counting patents and publications to measure scientific productivity and explore the contributions of all members of project teams.