SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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79–375PS
2002
H.R. 4664, THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2002
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
MAY 9, 2002
Serial No. 107–63
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/science
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE
HON. SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT, New York, Chairman
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
DANA ROHRABACHER, California
JOE BARTON, Texas
KEN CALVERT, California
NICK SMITH, Michigan
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan
DAVE WELDON, Florida
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota
CHRIS CANNON, Utah
GEORGE R. NETHERCUTT, JR., Washington
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma
GARY G. MILLER, California
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois
WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
TIMOTHY V. JOHNSON, Illinois
MIKE PENCE, Indiana
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FELIX J. GRUCCI, JR., New York
MELISSA A. HART, Pennsylvania
J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
RALPH M. HALL, Texas
BART GORDON, Tennessee
JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois
JAMES A. BARCIA, Michigan
EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
LYNN C. WOOLSEY, California
LYNN N. RIVERS, Michigan
ZOE LOFGREN, California
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas
BOB ETHERIDGE, North Carolina
NICK LAMPSON, Texas
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
MARK UDALL, Colorado
DAVID WU, Oregon
ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York
BRIAN BAIRD, Washington
JOSEPH M. HOEFFEL, Pennsylvania
JOE BACA, California
JIM MATHESON, Utah
STEVE ISRAEL, New York
DENNIS MOORE, Kansas
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MICHAEL M. HONDA, California
Subcommittee on Research
NICK SMITH, Michigan, Chairman
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota
FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma
GARY G. MILLER, California
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois
W. TODD AKIN, Missouri
TIMOTHY V. JOHNSON, Illinois
FELIX J. GRUCCI, JR., New York
MELISSA A. HART, Pennsylvania
SHERWOOD L. BOEHLERT, New York
EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas
BOB ETHERIDGE, North Carolina
STEVE ISRAEL, New York
LYNN N. RIVERS, Michigan
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
BRIAN BAIRD, Washington
JOE BACA, California
DENNIS MOORE, Kansas
MICHAEL M. HONDA, California
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RALPH M. HALL, Texas
SHARON HAYS Subcommittee Staff Director
DAN BYERS Professional Staff Member/Designee
JIM WILSON Democratic Professional Staff Member
DIANE JONES, GREG GARCIA, KARIN LOHMAN Professional Staff Members
NATALIE PALMER Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
May 9, 2002
Witness List
Hearing Charter
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Nick Smith, Chairman, Subcommittee on Research, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives
Written Statement
Statement by Representative Bob Etheridge, Member, Subcommittee on Research, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives
Written Statement
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Prepared Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking Minority Member, Subcommittee on Research, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives
Prepared Statement by Representative Lamar Smith, Member, Subcommittee on Research, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives
Statement by Representative Constance Morella, Member, Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives
Witnesses
Dr. C. Daniel Mote, Jr., President, University of Maryland
Oral Statement
Written Statement
Dr. Ioannis (Yannis) Miaoulis, Dean of Engineering, Associate Provost, Tufts University
Oral Statement
Written Statement
Biography
Mr. Jerome I. Friedman, Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Oral Statement
Written Statement
Biography
Financial Disclosure
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Discussion
Appendix 1: Additional Material for the Record
Comments of Dr. Donald E. Thompson, Vice President for Research and Dean, The Graduate College, Western Michigan University, presented at a Listening Session Conducted by Members of the House Science Subcommittee on Research, Monday, May 6, 2002, Michigan National Tower Building, Lansing, Michigan
Comments of Marvin G. Parnes, Associate Vice President for Research and Executive Director of Research Administration, University of Michigan, presented at a Listening Session Conducted by Members of the House Science Subcommittee on Research, Monday, May 6, 2002, Michigan National Tower Building, Lansing, Michigan
H.R. 4664, THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION REAUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2002
THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2002
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Research,
Committee on Science,
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Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 9:38 a.m., in Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Nick Smith [Chairman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
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HEARING CHARTER
SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
H.R. 4664, The National Science Foundation
Authorization Act of 2002
THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2002
9:30 A.M.–12:00 P.M.
2318 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING
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I. PURPOSE
On Thursday, May 9, 2002, the House Committee on Science's Research Subcommittee will hold a hearing to receive testimony on H.R. 4664, ''The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002,'' which was introduced by Rep. Nick Smith, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, and Rep. Ralph Hall. Witnesses will testify on the legislation, which provides authorizations for the National Science Foundation (NSF) for fiscal years 2003, 2004, and 2005, as well as policy provisions related to major research facilities funded by the Foundation, interagency coordination of astronomy research, and public access to meetings of the National Science Board.
II. BACKGROUND
The National Science Foundation was established by Congress in 1950. The agency's mission is unique among the Federal Government's scientific research agencies in that it is to support science and engineering across all disciplines. NSF currently funds research and education activities at more than 2,000 universities, colleges, K–12 schools, businesses, and other research institutions throughout the United States. Virtually all of this support is provided through competitive, peer-reviewed grants and cooperative agreements. Although NSF's research and development budget accounts for only about four percent of all federally funded research, the role of NSF in promoting fundamental research is vital to the Nation's scientific enterprise, as NSF provides approximately 25 percent of the federal support for basic research conducted at academic institutions.
The Foundation is administrated by a Director, who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate and is responsible for the overall operations of the agency. The Foundation is overseen by the National Science Board, a body of 24 eminent scientists who are appointed by the President (with confirmation by the Senate) to serve six-year terms. Terms may be renewed but no member of the Board can serve more than 12 consecutive years. The role of the Board, as set forth in the ''National Science Foundation Act of 1950,'' is to establish the policies of the Foundation, provide oversight of its programs and activities, and approve its strategic directions and budgets.
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NSF Budget by Functional Activities
The NSF budget can be divided into four general categories:
research project support funded through the Research and Related Activities (RRA) account, which supports cutting-edge research;
facilities, funded through the Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account, which supports large, multi-user research facilities;
education and training, funded through the Education and Human Resources (EHR) account, which supports math and science education programs at the K–12, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels; and
administration, which supports Salaries and Expenses (SE) and the office of the Inspector General (IG) at NSF.
A detailed description of activities funded by each account is provided in Appendix 1.
The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002
''The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002'' sets the National Science Foundation on the path to double over the next five years. The Act authorizes $5.515 billion for NSF in FY 2003, a $719 million, or 15 percent, increase over the agency's FY02 funding levels. The bill provides 15 percent increases for each of fiscal years 2004 and 2005. A summary of the funding levels authorized in the bill, as well as the President's request levels for the Foundation's FY 2003 budget, is provided in Table 1 below. A description of the funding levels for each account follows.
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Research and Related Activities (RRA). The RRA account provides funding for the research projects that make up the core of the Foundation's activities. Most of this funding is provided as grants to researchers, typically at colleges and universities though some also goes to companies, non-profit research institutes, and other entities, for the support of investigator-initiated research.
''The NSF Authorization Act of 2002'' provides $4.14 billion, or 15 percent above the FY 2002 level, for FY 2003. The bill provides increases of 14 percent for FY 2002 and 15 percent for FY 2005. These increases will enable the Foundation to increase grant size and duration as well as increasing the number of awards made. The authorization bill also specifies funding levels for research on information technology, nanotechnology, mathematics, and major research instrumentation in fiscal years 2003 and 2004.
Education and Human Resources (EHR). NSF's Education and Human Resources Directorate is charged with supporting efforts to improve mathematics, science, engineering and technology education at every level of education.
''The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002'' authorizes $1.01 billion for education programs under the EHR directorate in FY 2003, which will enable the agency to continue funding current programs while also providing funding for new programs such as those outlined in recent and pending legislation before Congress. The bill increases funding for education by 15 percent in each FY 2003, FY 2004 and FY 2005.
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Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC). The MREFC account, formerly the Major Research Equipment account, was established in FY 1995 to provide funding for large and unique research facilities. ''The NSF Authorization Act of 2002'' authorizes $152 million for the MREFC account in FY 2003, an increase of almost 14 million, or 9.8 percent. The bill increases funding for this account by 48 percent in FY 2004 and 27 percent in FY 2005. These increases will permit NSF to continue funding for current projects and begin to relieve the backlog of projects that have been approved by the NSB but have not yet been funded.
In addition to providing additional funds for this account, the NSF Authorization Act of 2002 contains policy provisions that are aimed at clarifying the process by which projects are selected for funding. These provisions, which address concerns raised by the scientific community, are discussed in more depth in the Changes to the MRE Selection Process section.
Administration and Management. Currently, a number of management positions at NSF are held by temporary employees who come from colleges, universities, the private sector, and other government agencies to work at NSF for three years or less. MREFC projects span multiple years, are complex and usually involve several phases of design and implementation, construction, and operation. Lack of management continuity at the NSF can lead to project delays and cost overruns. ''The NSF Authorization Act of 2002'' specifically precludes the agency's use of temporary employees to manage major research facility projects.
Recognizing that the Foundation has relied heavily upon temporary workers because it has been limited in the number of permanent employee positions available, ''The NSF Authorization Act of 2002'' provides for an increase of $34 million, or 19 percent, over FY 2002. This is the same increase called for in the President's FY 2003 budget and is sufficient to support investments in the development, implementation, operation, and upgrade of NSF's information infrastructure, the recruitment of additional permanent staff, and the implementation of personnel development and training programs. Authorizations for the S&E and the IG accounts in FY 2004 and FY 2005 reflect a three percent increase from the prior year.
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Changes to the MREFC Selection Process
The process by which NSF's major research equipment and facilities construction projects are selected and funded has been of great interest to the Science Committee. New projects are conceived by the research community and proposed to NSF. NSF reviews the proposals and sends some of the MREFC proposals to the NSB for approval. While the NSB intends for all of the MREFC projects it approves to be funded as soon as possible, budgetary constraints have precluded the inclusion of many approved projects in the next budget request. Indeed, some NSB-approved projects have been waiting for years for inclusion in a budget request. The final authority to include an approved project in the budget request rests with the Administration.
While the NSB retains the authority to approve any given NSF budget submission, so far it has not exercised its authority to specifically prioritize the current backlog of NSB-approved MREFC projects. The lack of clarity regarding the prioritization of MREFC projects, coupled with the absence of a long-term plan regarding future Foundation investments in major research facilities, has resulted in uncertainty and confusion about the prospect for the funding of major facilities. The Science Committee has urged the NSB and the Foundation to make this process more transparent.
''The NSF Authorization Act of 2002'' requires that the Director submit a numerically prioritized list of pending MREFC projects to the NSB for its approval. The Director is required to provide to the Congress the NSB-approved prioritized list, the criterion by which they were evaluated, and a description of the individual factors for each project that determined its ranking on the list.
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Interagency Coordination of Astronomy Research
NSF and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sponsor the majority of federally funded astronomy research in the United States. NSF has traditionally supported ground-based observatories and small research groups while NASA's strength has been the support of major space-based missions. However, concerns about the management of federally funded research in astronomy in fiscal year 2002 prompted the Administration to direct NASA and the NSF to establish a blue-ribbon panel to study and address changes in the field, including the increased interdependence of space-based and ground-based research, the major contribution of private observatories, and the growing role of NASA support for astronomy and astrophysics. NASA and NSF asked the National Research Council to carry out the rapid assessment requested by the Administration.
The primary recommendation of the blue-ribbon panel was the establishment of an interagency planning board to provide systematic, comprehensive, and coordinated planning of astronomy and astrophysics research and investments ''in order to sustain and maximize the flow of scientific benefits from the federal, state, and private investments.'' This advisory board, established by ''The NSF Authorization Act of 2002'' as the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, will assess and make recommendations regarding the coordinated planning between NASA and NSF for all aspects of federally funded astronomy and astrophysics research including facilities planning, research funding, data management, and support of the related talent pool necessary for continuing advances in the field.
National Science Board (NSB) Meetings
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Concern has arisen that the meetings of the NSB, which fall under the requirements of the Government in the Sunshine Act (now contained in section 552b of Title 5 USC), have not fully lived up to the spirit of this law, which was intended to make meetings regarding a federal agency's activities open to the public (with narrow statutory exemptions). The Board typically holds most of its meetings, including committee meetings where much of the Board's work gets done, behind closed doors, with a single session open to the public at the meeting's end.
''The NSF Authorization Act of 2002'' requires the NSF Inspector General to conduct an annual audit of NSB compliance with the Sunshine Act to including the extent to which the proposed and actual content of closed meetings is consistent with those requirements. The IG shall transmit this audit to the Congress along with recommendations for any corrective action that needs to be taken to achieve fuller compliance with the requirements of the Government in the Sunshine Act.
III. WITNESSES
The witnesses will consider issues related to the NSF Authorization Act of 2002. Each witness will be asked to comment on the legislation and address specific issues related to it. Witness biographies are included in Appendix II.
Ioannis (Yannis) Miaoulis, Ph.D., Associate Provost, Dean, School of Engineering, Tufts University. Dr. Miaoulis will testify as to the potential of this legislation to promote and advance progress in science and engineering across all disciplines and support the education and training of scientists and engineers He will also address the role of the Foundation in improving K–12 math and science education.
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Jerome I. Friedman, Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Friedman will testify on the potential of this legislation to promote and advance progress in science and engineering across all disciplines. He will also testify on policy provisions in the bill related to NSF's MREFC program and interagency coordination of astronomy and astrophysics research.
C.D. Mote, Jr., Ph.D, President, University of Maryland. Dr. Mote will testify on the potential of the legislation to promote and advance progress in science and engineering across all disciplines; the importance of basic research on educational institutions and the impact of research on the economy; and the impact of NSF funded programs on the training of the science and technology workforce.
APPENDIX I—ACCOUNT DETAIL
Research and Related Activities
Biological Sciences—The Biological Sciences directorate supports programs through six divisions: Molecular and Cellular Biosciences; Integrative Biology and Neuroscience; Environmental Biology; Biological Infrastructure; Emerging Frontiers; and Plant Genome Research. Activities supported by the directorate include research into proteins and nucleic acids, cells, organs, and organisms, and populations and ecosystems.
Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)—Six divisions comprise the CISE directorate. They are: Computer-Communications Research; Information and Intelligence Systems; Experimental and Integrative Activities; Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research; Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research; and Information Technology Research. These divisions support research on the theories and foundations of computing, software, computer system design, and human/computer interactions. In addition, CISE supports developing and testing advanced computing and communications systems.
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Engineering—The Engineering directorate supports six divisions: Bioengineering and Environmental Systems; Chemical and Transport Systems; Civil and Mechanical Systems; Design, Manufacture, and Industrial Innovation; Electrical and Communications Systems; and Engineering Education Centers. Engineering's goals are to develop the next generation of engineers, spur technical innovations, and create new ideas and enterprises.
Geosciences—This directorate supports research in three divisions: Atmospheric Sciences; Earth Sciences; and Ocean Sciences. The focus of this research is on predicting natural phenomena, such as weather, climate, earthquakes, fish-stocks, and space weather. It also supports NSF's portion of the Global Climate Change Research Program.
Mathematical and Physical Sciences—This directorate funds research in six divisions: Astronomical Sciences; Chemistry; Materials Research; Mathematical Sciences; Physics; and Multidisciplinary Activities.
Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE)—SBE's four divisions—Social and Economic Sciences; Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences; International Science and Engineering; and Science Resources Statistics—support fundamental research into the human characteristics and behavior, support the NSF's international activities, and provide U.S. scientists and engineers access to international science and engineering centers throughout the world. SBE also tracks trends in personnel and infrastructure that comprise the Nation's science and engineering enterprise.
Polar Programs—Polar Programs include the U.S. Polar Research Program and the U.S. Antarctic Logistical Support Activities. Both the Arctic and Antarctic provide unique environments for studying the earth, ice, oceans, atmospheric sciences, and astronomy.
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Integrative Activities—Integrative Activities supports emerging cross-disciplinary research and education efforts. It funds four types of projects: Major Research Instrumentation; Science and Technology Centers; Science of Learning Centers; and the Science and Technology Policy Institute.
Priority Areas of Research
The FY 2003 Budget Request emphasizes investments in six interdependent priority areas. Within the priority areas, there is a rich mix of activity that integrates areas of fundamental research with elements of practice in related fields. Each priority area is discussed below.
Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE): BE is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding our world's environment. Research in this area is aimed at understanding the many complex systems that are structured or influenced by living organisms or biological processes. According to NSF, investment in this field will have enormous payoff in the years ahead, including increased understanding of the relationship between the environment and human health, discoveries relevant to growing industries such as biotechnology, and enhanced predictability of environmental systems that will assist environmental decision-makers.
Information Technology Research (ITR): ITR supports research to create and utilize cutting-edge cyber-infrastructure and will create new opportunities for research and technology development.
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Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSE): NSE encompasses the systematic organization, manipulation and control of matter at atomic, molecular and supramolecular levels. NSE holds the promise of enabling a better understanding of nature, a new world of products beyond what is now possible, higher efficiency in manufacturing, sustainable development, better health care, and improved human performance.
Learning for the 21st Century Workforce: This priority area focuses on generating the base of knowledge that will support effective research-based pedagogies that will address these higher order skills and prepare and support the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce of the future.
Mathematical Sciences (MS): This priority area supports research in three areas: fundamental mathematical and statistical sciences, interdisciplinary research involving the mathematical sciences with science and engineering, and critical investments in mathematical sciences education.
Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE): The aim of this new priority area is to better understand how technology and society advance through continual interactions.
Education and Human Resources
Math and Science Partnership (MSP)—The strategic focus of MSP is to engage the Nation's higher education institutions, local, regional and state school districts and other partners in pre-K–12 reform. MSP calls for a significant commitment by colleges and universities to improving the quality of science and mathematics instruction in the schools and to investing in the recruitment and professional development of highly competent science and math teachers.
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Educational System Reform (ESR)—Programs under this sub-activity include large-scale reform of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) education, with the primary focus on the K–12 level. Systemic reform projects constitute a major element of NSF's education initiatives and include Urban Systemic Programs; and Rural Systemic Initiatives. These programs provide participating school systems access to science and mathematics educational resources and professional development for teachers.
Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)—EPSCoR is a partnership between NSF and certain states, and is designed to improve the competitiveness of research programs at universities in participating states. EPSCoR promotes partnerships among state governments, universities, and industry in areas of research that have potential for growth. States participating in the EPSCoR program are: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education (ESIE)—The ESIE sub-activity focuses on SMET instruction for K–12 students and promotes public literacy in these fields. ESIE activities are divided into three areas: Instructional and Assessment Materials Development; Teacher Development; and Informal Science Education.
Undergraduate Education—NSF's efforts to improve undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education are focused on two areas: 1) Curriculum, Laboratory, and Instructional Development and 2) Teacher and Technician Development.
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Graduate Education—Activities under the Graduate Education sub-activity support graduate research fellowships, traineeships, and post-doctoral fellowships. The goals of the program are: 1) to develop a diverse group of individuals with advanced degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering; 2) to reform graduate education; and 3) to strengthen links between higher education and K–12 education.
Human Resource Development (HRD)—HRD programs focus on improving research and educational opportunities for minorities, women, and people with disabilities. Activities are divided into three major areas: 1) Undergraduate/Graduate Student Support; 2) Research and Education Infrastructure; and 3) Opportunities for Women and Persons with Disabilities.
Research, Evaluation, and Communication (REC)—Research activities within this sub-activity focus on the collection and analysis of data and the conduct of studies on learning, teaching practices, and organizational support for SMET education. One of these programs is Research on Learning and Education (ROLE), which attempts to integrate different scientific disciplines into research on learning and education. Evaluation programs in the sub-activity seek to ensure the accountability of NSF's SMET initiatives.
Major Research Equipment
Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA)—When completed ALMA, an aperture-synthesis radio telescope, will be the world's most sensitive, highest resolution, millimeter-wavelength telescope, providing opportunities to test theories of star birth and evolution, the formation of galaxies, and the origins of the universe.
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Earthscope—EarthScope is a distributed, multi-purpose instrument array that will allow scientists to study the structure and dynamics of the North American continent. The first element, the USArray, is a dense array of high-capability seismometers that will be deployed throughout the U.S. to greatly improve our resolution of subsurface structure. The second, San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) will provide access for the first time to a major active fault at depth to monitor fault conditions and study nucleation and rupture processes of earthquakes. USArray and SAFOD are elements in a complex approach to understanding and simulating earthquake physics.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—The LHC is made up of two detectors—a Toroidal Large Angle Spectrometer (ATLAS) and a Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). The LHC is located at CERN in Switzerland and when complete will provide researchers the tools to study the products of the very high-energy proton-proton collisions that will occur in the accelerator.
Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES)—This Network will include geographically distributed and network-interconnected physical facilities with whom NSF has cooperative agreements. The objective of NEES is to provide interoperability, resource sharing, scalable and efficient net-wide deployment, open-system standardization, database consistency and integrity, and modularity in software and hardware architectures. The Network will then be able to convert earthquake engineering research from physical experiments to investigations grounded on model-based simulation, which will integrate the nationally-distributed facilities to afford remote access.
National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)—NEON, when complete, will consist of 10 observatories nationwide that will serve as national research platforms for integrated, cutting-edge research in the field of biology. The network will allow scientists to conduct experiments on ecological systems at all levels of biological organization from molecular genetics to whole ecosystems and across scales from seconds to geological time. NEON is needed to understand how our nation's ecosystems function and to predict their response to natural and anthropogenic events. The 10 geographically distributed NEON observatories will have scalable computation capabilities and will be networked via satellite and landlines to the very high-performance Backbone Network System (vBNS).
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South Pole Station—In addition to providing a facility for wide-ranging scientific research, the South Pole Station is important in maintaining a U.S. presence in the Antarctic. Its unique location makes it the ideal place to conduct leading-edge science in various fields, including astronomy and atmospheric research.
Terascale—The project will be connected to the existing PACI network and will be coordinated with other agencies, particularly DOE, to leverage the software, tools, and technology investments, while ensuring a full and open competition.
Administration and Management
Salaries and Expenses (S&E)—The S&E account provides funds for staff salaries, benefits, travel, training, rent, contractual services, supplies, equipment, and other necessary expenses.
Inspector General (IG)—The Office of the Inspector General was established to promote efficiency and effectiveness in administering NSF's programs and to detect and prevent waste and misuse of Foundation funds.
Appendix II—Witness Biographies:
Ioannis (Yannis) Miaoulis, Associate Provost, Dean, School of Engineering, Tufts University
Dr. Miaoulis graduated with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Tufts University, a Master of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT, a Master of Arts in economics and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Tufts. Miaoulis started his academic career in 1987 as an Assistant Professor in the mechanical engineering department at Tufts, where he is now a full tenured professor. He was named Associate Dean of the School of Engineering in 1993 and Dean in 1994. He served as interim Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and was appointed Associate Provost in 2001. He is the founder of the Tufts Thermal Analysis of Material Processes Laboratory, the Tufts Comparative Biomechanics Laboratory, the Engineering Project Development Center, the Center for Engineering Educational Outreach, and the Tufts Entrepreneurial Leadership Program. He oversees major University initiatives, such as the Tufts University Center for Children, the Institute on Aging, the Tufts Institute for the Environment, the Africa Forum, the Tufts Institute for Global Security, and the Tufts Statistics Project. In addition, Dr. Miaoulis currently directs or co-directs numerous projects aimed at enhancing pre-K–12 science and technology/engineering education. He spearheaded the introduction of engineering into the Massachusetts science and technology/engineering public school curriculum and is now working with other states to expand this effort nationally. Dr. Miaoulis has received many awards for his research, teaching, and involvement in pre-K–12 science education, including the Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Outstanding Young Leader award. Dr. Miaoulis has a wide range of research and teaching interests, including microscale heat transfer phenomena, air pollution prevention, materials processing, and comparative biomechanics. He has authored over 100 refereed articles and given more than 80 invited and contributed presentations at conferences and events. His work is often featured in the popular press.
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Jerome I. Friedman, Ph.D., Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jerome Friedman was born in Chicago in 1930 and received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. After post doctoral positions at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, he was hired at MIT in 1960 as an assistant professor and was promoted to Professor in 1967. At MIT he has served as Director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Head of the Physics Department. In 1991, he was appointed as Institute Professor. He is an experimental particle physicist who received, jointly with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 for the experimental discovery of quarks. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a member of advisory committees for the DOE, the National Research Council, the University Research Association and various laboratories in the U.S. and abroad. He also served as President of the American Physical Society and Chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents.
C.D. Mote, Jr., Ph.D, President, University of Maryland
In September 1998, C.D. (Dan) Mote, Jr. began his tenure as President of the University of Maryland and Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering. Prior to assuming the Presidency at Maryland, Dr. Mote served on the University of California, Berkeley faculty for 31 years. From 1991 to 1998, he was Vice Chancellor at Berkeley, held an endowed chair in Mechanical Systems and was President of the UC Berkeley Foundation. He led a comprehensive capital campaign for Berkeley that raised $1.4 B. He earlier served as Chair of Berkeley's Department of Mechanical Engineering and led the department to its number one ranking in the National Research Council review of graduate program effectiveness.
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Dr. Mote's research lies in dynamic systems and biomechanics. Internationally recognized for his research on the dynamics of gyroscopic systems, including high-speed translating and rotating systems, and the biomechanics of snow skiing, he has produced more than 300 publications, holds patents in the U.S., Norway, Finland and Sweden, and has mentored 56 Ph.D. students. He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
President Mote has received numerous awards and honors, including the Humboldt Prize awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany. He is a recipient of the Berkeley Citation, an award from the University of California-Berkeley similar to the honorary doctorate, and was named Distinguished Engineering Alumnus. He has received two honorary doctorates. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, was elected to Honorary Membership in the ASME International, its most distinguished recognition, and is a Fellow of the International Academy of Wood Science, the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Chairman SMITH. The Subcommittee on Research will come to order. And good morning and welcome everybody to what I consider a very exciting hearing this morning. Today the Subcommittee needs to receive testimony on H.R. 4664, the National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002. We will immediately, following the hearing, markup the NSF legislation, and following that with a markup of H.R. 3130, the Technology Talent Act of 2002. Last Monday this Committee held a hearing on NSF Authorization in Lansing, Michigan. We received testimony from some of our leading research universities. And without objection, I would move that that testimony and listening session be included as part of the hearing testimony on NSF in this record.(see footnote 1) Hearing no objections, so ordered.
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This is our third hearing this year on NSF. We have also held hearings in the Full Committee on the budget from the director of NSF in terms of the budget request by the Administration. We have had numerous oversight hearings on NSF since the last authorization for the Energy expired in 2000. Those hearings provided the foundation for the bipartisan legislation that Representative Johnson, I, I think most of the people at this dios have all introduced. And we will ask our witnesses to comment today on their thoughts and ideas and suggestions of how we most effectively proceed with the National Science Foundation Authorization.
H.R. 4664 provides a 15 percent annual increase over through fiscal year 2005 for NSF, which will put us on a 5-year track for doubling the NSF Research Authorization. While I generally maintain a philosophy of limited government, I tend to continue to push for the 15 percent increase. Those of us that look at the basis for continued economic development in this country have been convinced that research is, if you will, the seed corn, the basis of our ability to produce new products and to develop new methods of production that is going to allow us to compete effectively in a continually challenging world market. I think a good indicator of our success in funding competitive peer reviewed research like that at NSF is seen in those who attempt to copy what we do here in the United States. All over the world nations devote significant portions of their R&D budgets to monitoring the work of what we are doing in the United States, to try to copy and emulate how we accomplish that work, especially what has been considered an exceptional modeling example our peer review process to try to adjust—come up with those particular projects that deserve the greatest merits.
Understanding I think the important of continuing this record of success is one of the primary reasons we are advocating the 15 percent increase, but there are numerous others. For instance, we felt there was a need to increase the size and duration of NSF grants while maintaining the current 30 percent success rate of grant applications or even increasing the number of grant applications, and in addition to that, address the growing concerns that NSF was maybe rejecting too many of the grant applications that were coming in. Certainly our goal has got to be to conduct—spend our time as most effectively and efficiently as we can conducting that research. A tremendous effort in writing those grant application for that kind of percentage acceptance. So the 15 percent increase will help us to some extent in that regard. We wanted to provide support for new initiatives such as education, cyber security, information technology, nanotechnology. And lastly, we wanted to address the problem of backlogged major research equipment projects that have been waiting for funding. I think this bill does well to address those concerns and you can imagine that with the ambitious agenda, it is not difficult to find programs to use up the 15 percent. We look for your guidance in that regard.
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Allow me to highlight just a few of the provisions in the bill. It provides strong support for NSF initiative in networking and information technology consistent with what we included in the legislation 3400 now on the floor at the House. And we also addressed what we felt was a growing problem in administration of major research equipment or the MRE account to try to minimize the political decisions of which major projects that we moved ahead with based on who had clout in the political arena and in the Appropriations Committee to ask the Science Board and the Director to specifically prioritized numerically what they considered the most—the first, second, third and such most important. So Mr. Friedman, looking forward to your comments in that regard especially.
Another situation that we are facing and that I think you will agree is that we need to catch up with the Major Equipment Account, facilities and projects through the United States. And in that regard, in the second year we have a 50 percent increase in that account within this Authorization Bill. Another question that we confronted in writing this Bill is that funding among the eight directorates, within the Research and Related Activities Account, we worked to come with funding levels that assure a substantial increase in all of the directorates, but want to very carefully make sure that we just don't continue the status quo, that we examine those directorates and that we look at such areas as the physical efforts that we are in much need of to make sure that account is not simply left behind because traditionally it has a lesser smaller increase than the other directorates in the past. The Bill does ask NSF to report each year on the methodology used in distributing the funding among the directorates.
Let me conclude. This is taking quite a bit of time. But these—there is a lot of promising advancements on the horizon. Technologies are only limited by the creativity of our researches. And of course what is very important is our effort to expand the grants and the stipends to students to get more students interested and stay in that career as they finish college and go into graduate work. I am looking forward to hearing the comments of our witnesses on this legislation, which we will take back for consideration before the Bill goes to full Committee. I expect a productive discussion this morning and I hope that it will be followed by a very smooth, for lack of a better word, markup of this legislation. I will now recognize my colleague, the Ranking Member, Mrs. Eddie—no, excuse me—Representative Etheridge for his comments.
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[The prepared statement of Chairman Smith follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN NICK SMITH
Good morning and welcome to this morning's hearing of the Subcommittee on Research. Today the Subcommittee meets to receive testimony on H.R. 4664, ''The National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2002'' that was introduced earlier this week. We will immediately follow the hearing with a markup of the NSF legislation, and immediately follow that with a markup of H.R. 3130, the Technology Talent Act of 2002.
This is our second hearing this year on NSF. We have also held numerous oversight hearings on NSF since the last authorization for the agency expired at the end of fiscal year 2000. Those hearings provided the foundation for the bipartisan legislation that Representative Johnson and I, along with Chairman Boehlert and Ranking Member Hall, introduced on Tuesday and which we will ask our witnesses to comment on today.
H.R. 4664 provides a 15 percent annual increase over through FY 2005 for NSF, which will put us on a 5-year doubling track.
While I generally maintain a philosophy of limited government and I intend to continue to push for increased private investment in research, I think tax funded basic research has been a very worthwhile investment. Continuing our support of basic research forms the building blocks for the applied research that keeps our security, health, and economy strong.
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I think a good indicator of our success in funding competitive, peer-reviewed research like that at NSF is seen in those who attempt to copy what we do here in the United States. All over the world, nations devote significant portions of their R&D budgets to monitoring the work of agencies like NSF. They have also been moving very rapidly to adopt NSF's model of peer-reviewed, competitive funding of basic research.
Understanding the importance of continuing this record of success is one of the primary reasons I am advocating the 15 percent increase—but there are numerous other reasons as well. For instance—(1) We felt there was a need to increase the size and duration of NSF grants while maintaining the current 30 percent success rate of grant applications, and in addition to that address growing concerns that NSF was rejecting too many, over 30 percent, of the highest rated peer-reviewed proposals; (2) We also felt it was critical to increase graduate student stipends so that we can attract the best and the brightest students to pursue graduate degrees in math and science; (3) We wanted provide support for new initiatives such as education, cyber security and information technology, and nanotechnology; and (4) lastly we wanted to address the problem of backlogged major research equipment projects that have been waiting for funding. I think this bill does well to address those concerns, and you can imagine with that ambitious agenda that it is not difficult to find programs to use up the 15 percent increase.
Allow me to highlight a few of the provisions in the bill. One—this bill provides strong support for NSF's initiative in Networking and Information Technology, consistent with what we included in my legislation, H.R. 3400, which we reported out of the Science Committee this year. We also addressed what we felt was a growing problem in administration of the Major Research Equipment, or MRE, account. We have asked that the Director of NSF provide to the National Science Board each year a numerically prioritized list indicating and justifying funding priorities of NSB-approved MRE projects. We believe that this list will begin to provide transparency to the MRE funding process, allowing the research community to better plan for these major scientific projects. Additionally, we have provided a 10 percent increase in the MRE account for FY 2003, and 48 percent and 27 percent increases in FY 2004 and 2005, respectively.
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Another question that we confronted in writing this bill is that of funding among the eight directorates within the Research and Related Activities account. Staff worked tirelessly to come up with funding levels for individual directorates—using indicators such as grant pressure, priority areas, historical funding, and others—but in the end we decided that the Director, Dr. Colwell would be best suited to make these decisions. The bill does, however, ask the NSF to report each year on the methodology used in distributing this funding.
These promising advancements that are on the horizon—technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, cyber security, high-tech weapons, telemedicine, and others that we have yet to even imagine, would not move forward without strong support of the National Science Foundation, and I am pleased to be introducing this bill today. I am optimistic that this bill will garner the strong bipartisan support that it needs to move quickly through the Committee and the House, and I am optimistic that we can have it completed in time for the FY 2003 Appropriations process.
I am looking forward to hearing the comments of our witnesses on this legislation, which we will take back for consideration before the bill goes before the Full Committee. I expect a productive discussion this morning, and I hope that it will be followed by a smooth markup of the legislation.
I will now recognize my colleague and Ranking Member Ms. Eddie Bernice Johnson for an opening statement.
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Mr. ETHERIDGE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I join you in welcoming our distinguished witnesses to today's hearings on the Authorization—really a reauthorization from the National Science Foundation. As a lead source of Federal funding for basic research at the colleges and universities, the NSF supports research and educational programs that are critical to technical advances in the private sector and for training the next generation of scientists and engineers. NSF's funding really funds cutting-edge research and engineering and computing that are of tremendous interest to the United States.
Although often overlooked, the research funded by the foundation has played a critical role in rising—in raising the standard of living in the United States and truly around the world. With a small portion of Federal spending, the National Science Foundation has had a powerful impact on national science and engineering. Every dollar invested in this agency returns many fold to our economic growth and prosperity in America. I believe maintaining the nations global scientific and economic leadership provides the best justification for funding your basic research. I also believe that a solid academic foundation in math and science education is critical for success in the 21st century. Over 25 percent of the Federal support of academic institutions for basic research is provided through NSF and about 50 percent of the funding for non-medical research at universities is also provided by this agency.
NSF also supports 46 percent of the basic research in engineering performed at our universities and colleges and helps train about 25,000 graduate students every year. I am pleased with the accomplishments that the National Science Foundation has made in its research and education initiatives and I strongly support the doubling of NSF budget by the proposed increase of 15 percent over the next three years in pursuing this effort. It will really be five.
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As those of you on the panel today may not know, I was the former State Superintendent of the Schools in the State of North Carolina for a period of time. And I worked for many years to improve science and math education in our public schools. We need better math and science instruction in our K–12 classrooms. Quality instruction is the key to helping students learn in these very critical skills especially as we move into the 21st century. This increase in NSF's budget will help ensure that improved math and science education remains an important national priority, which I think it must. This actually will make a real difference for our children and will put America on the road toward a higher standing in the world as we deal with this whole issue of math and science. At a time when we are trying to improve the quality and quantity of math and science in American, appropriate investment in the National Science Foundation are critical to enable students to compete in today's knowledge-based economy. The National Science Foundation is an investment in our future in the very truest sense of the word. I would like to thank each of you for being here this morning and appearing before the Subcommittee and look forward to your testimony and the opportunity we have for questions later. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Etheridge follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE BOB ETHERIDGE
I am pleased to join the Chairman in welcoming our distinguished witnesses to today's hearing on the authorization for the National Science Foundation (NSF).
As the lead source of federal funding for basic research at colleges and universities, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supports research and education programs that are crucial to technological advances in the private sector and for training the next generation of scientists and engineers. NSF funds cutting-edge research in engineering and computing that are of tremendous interest to the United States. Although often overlooked, the research funded by the Foundation has played a pivotal role in raising the basic standards of living in the United States and around the world. With a small portion of federal spending, the National Science Foundation has had a powerful impact on national science and engineering. Every dollar invested in this agency returns many-fold its worth in economic growth.
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I believe maintaining the Nation's global scientific and economic leadership provides the best justification for funding basic research. I also believe that a solid academic foundation in math and science education is crucial for success in the 21st Century. Over 25 percent of the federal support for academic institutions for basic research is provided through NSF, and about 50 percent of the funding for non-medical research at universities is provided through the agency. NSF also supports 46 percent of the basic research in engineering performed at universities and colleges, and helps train more than 25,000 graduate students each year. I am pleased with the accomplishments that the National Science Foundation has made in its research and education initiatives and I strongly support the doubling of the NSF's budget by the proposed increase of 15 percent over the next three years in pursuit of this effort.
As the former Superintendent of Schools in my home state of North Carolina, I have worked for many years to improve science and math education in our schools. We need better math and science instruction in our K–12 classrooms. Quality instruction is the key to helping students learn in these critical fields. This increase in NSF's budget will help ensure that improving math and science education remains an important national priority. This action will make a real difference for our children and will put America on the road toward a higher standing in the world in math and science.
At a time when we are trying to improve the quality and quantity of math and science in America appropriate investments in the National Science Foundation are critical to enable students to compete in the today's knowledge-based economy.
The National Science Foundation is an investment in our future in the truest sense of the word.
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I would like to again thank our panelists for appearing before the Subcommittee today and I look forward to hearing your testimony.
Chairman SMITH. Thank you. Our first panel is——
Mr. SMITH. Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SMITH. Yes, Mr. Smith.
Mr. SMITH. If I could interrupt you briefly, I would like unanimous consent to have my opening statement made a part of the record at the appropriate time.
Chairman SMITH. Certainly without objection and all other statements. And Representative Smith if you would like to make a brief comment.
Mr. SMITH. No. I just wanted to have my opening statement made part of the record. I do have a brief comment and that is to say I would like to explain to the witnesses that I have a Subcommittee hearing to chair myself at 10 so unfortunately I won't be able to stay long but wish I could. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON
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Mr. Chairman, at our previous NSF authorization hearing in March, I pointed out that inadequate funding for NSF threatens the vitality of basic research in many fields of the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering that are critical for maintaining the long-term economic strength and security of the Nation. I also expressed my strong belief that the Committee should move an authorization bill, without delay, that would provide 15 percent annual growth needed for budget doubling over 5 years. This is the position I advocated in H.R. 1472, the NSF authorization bill that I introduced last year along with 16 of my Science Committee colleagues.
Consequently, I am more than pleased that today's hearing will review the Committee's draft NSF authorization bill, which embraces the 15 percent per year budget growth for the Foundation. Of course, I have not been alone in advocating this path. Calls for strengthening federal support for basic research have come from such diverse sources as former presidential science advisor Allen Bromley, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security.
Two of our witnesses are associated with organizations that are members of the Coalition for National Science Funding. This Coalition has issued a policy paper advocating 15 percent funding growth for fiscal year 2003 and outlining program areas where greater investment is needed. I look forward to hearing suggestions from all of our witnesses on areas of funding priority for NSF's programs.
Signs that there is need for greater investment are not difficult to find. For the past decade, federally funded research in the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering have seen little or no real growth. For example, in inflation-adjusted dollars for the period 1993 to 1998, funding for mathematics dropped by 20 percent, physics by 20 percent, chemistry by 10 percent, and some engineering fields by 20–40 percent. Because of insufficient resources, NSF annually must decline more than $1 billion dollars worth of high quality research proposals—that is, proposals with merit review scores as high or higher than the average score for funded proposals.
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Not surprisingly, this stringency in funding of research in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering influences student career choices. Between 1993 and 2000, graduate student enrollment in the physical sciences declined by 14 percent, declined by 24 percent in mathematics, and declined by 11 percent in engineering. These are dismal statistics when we contemplate the human resource base that will be necessary to sustain a technologically based economy for the future.
Support for basic research in science and engineering is not a partisan issue. The benefits that flow to our economy, to national security, and to the well being of our citizens are widely recognized. We need to take the steps that will provide for a vigorous academic research enterprise for the Nation and, thereby, will help fill the storehouse of basic knowledge that powers the future.
Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for calling this hearing and thank our witnesses for appearing before the Subcommittee today to provide their wisdom and recommendations on the NSF authorization bill. I look forward to our discussion.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE LAMAR SMITH
Mr. Chairman, I strongly support H.R. 4664 to authorize appropriations for the National Science Foundation for fiscal years 2003, 2004 and 2005.
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President Bush's budget proposal recognized the importance of science funding with a 9 percent increase in science and technology spending. That was good news. But among the various science agencies, the increases in amounts varied greatly.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) received the lion's share of funding under the Administration's proposal. The NIH budget has increased to a point where it is now larger than that of the rest of the science agencies put together. And the proposed increase alone in NIH funding is larger than the research budget of the National Science Foundation.
Biomedical research is important and NIH should receive adequate funding. The Administration's proposed budget recognized the importance of our physical health. But our nation's economic health is just as important as our nation's physical health.
Science inspires us to conquer the unknown, invent what doesn't exist and improve what already exists. It all begins with research.
Scientific research at NSF has greatly enhanced our lives and has advanced science and technology. Consider the benefits of better weather forecasting, the saved lives that result from MRIs, and the promise of fiber optic telecommunications and nanotechnology that will drive our scientific efforts in the new century.
Nowhere is fundamental research more promising or the benefits more widely distributed than in semiconductor R&D. For example, as semiconductors become ever smaller, faster, and cheaper, they approach the physical limits that will prevent further progress with current chip making processes.
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Yet, if research breakthroughs are achieved and new processes allow historic trends to continue, in 15 years semiconductor memory costs will be 1/100 today's costs, and microprocessors will be 15 times faster. The benefits to the national economy from these productivity improvements far exceed the added investments in science required to realize these benefits.
This bill provides a 15 percent increase in NSF funding through FY 'O5. It improves the quality of math and science education with $200 million in funding for the Math and Science Partnerships Initiative and encourages more U.S. students to enter graduate level science studies. In our technology driven economy, math and science skills are gaining in importance. If we want to prepare the next generation with the knowledge they need for success, we must arouse their curiosity in science.
This legislation recognizes the priority of research and development. We must continue to invest in the sciences or risk losing the ability to lead the world in scientific research.
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SMITH. And Representative Rivers, any short comment? Our first witness is Dr. Mote. For that introduction I would turn the podium over to Representative Morella.
Ms. MORELLA. Thank you, Chairman Smith. I appreciate the courtesy you extended me to be able to introduce one of three very distinguished witnesses today. I appeared on the Full Science Committee previously. I served on the basic Research Committee and you are doing a terrific job. I do want to commend you and the ranking member and the chairman of the full Committee on introducing this legislation. And I am honored to, as many of my members are, to be one of the original cosponsors. I think its time has come and I value your leadership in that regard. I am particularly pleased to be here today and to introduce the first witness today. And that is Dr. Dan Mote because Dr. Dan Mote is the President of Maryland's Educational Pride, The University of Maryland.
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Dr. Daniel Mote has been at the helm for nearly four years and has successfully positioned the university among the very elite research facilities. I do want to say he is an engineer by profession, has earned his Bachelor's, Master's, Ph.D. degrees at the University of California in Berkeley. And he came to the University of Maryland from being vice chancellor at Berkeley. He currently is in the National Academy of Engineering. He has many other professional affiliations and he will probably mention some of them to you, and he is on the technology counsel of Maryland. But let me just tell you a little bit about what has happened at the university since he is been there. The research expenditures at the university over his tenure have risen steadily and at a rate that exceeds most of its peers. Under his leadership, the university has become one of our nation's premier research facilities and a top recipient of Federal research and development dollars. Dr. Mote achieved his success on focusing on increasing interactions among the universities and the corporate and the Federal research laboratories. By expanding these partnerships and leading the university into research on bio-information and nanotechnology he has provided a shining example of how Federal research dollars can be leveraged into the development of important and useful technologies, not to mention an outstanding basketball team, national champions, and football team that won the ACC. The University of Maryland is a rising star in the research community not only because of his leadership but also because of the agency being discussed here today, the National Science Foundation. And so I am pleased that he is here and that we will have the benefit of his expertise of his testimony. And I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this enormous privilege. As Shakespeare said, ''The force of his own merits, makes his way.'' Thank you.
Chairman SMITH. Very good. Thank you, Connie. Our second witnesses or witness will be Dr. Ioannis Miaoulis. He is the Associate Provost and Dean of Engineering at Tufts University. He is the founder of the Tufts Thermal Analysis and Material Process Laboratory, the Tufts Comparative Bio-mechanics Laboratory, the Engineering Project Development Center, the Center for Engineering, Educational Outreach, as well as many other accomplishments. And Jerome—Dr. Jerome Friedman is our final witness. And he is Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 for the experimental discovery of Quarks. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Science. And among many others, he has been a member of the advisory committee of the Department of Energy where we also look for great research accomplishments. And gentlemen, again, thank you very much for taking the time to be here. And Dr. Mote, allow us to start with you. Your total testimony will be included in the record. And as best we can, hold your verbal comments to five or six minutes. You have a red light that goes on when five minutes are up. A whistle that goes off at around seven or so. Dr. Mote.
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STATEMENT OF DR. C. DANIEL MOTE, JR., PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK, ON BEHALF OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITIES (AAU) AND NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF STATE UNIVERSITIES AND LAND GRANT COLLEGES (NASULGC)
Dr. MOTE. Thank you very much, Chairman Smith, and thank you Representative Morella for being so kind to introduce me. I am very pleased by that. And Chairman Smith, in your Committee, I am sure you can hear this roar in the background is not the roar of the air conditioning system. It is actually the roar of my colleagues and other scientists and engineers around the United States applauding this very concerted effort you have to correct a long-standing and major problem, funding of NSF and it's importance to the future of our nation very fundamentally.
I am here to represent my own views of course but also the views of the American Association of Universities. This is a collection of the 61 largest research universities in the United States that spend more than 80 percent of Federal money in research across the board. I can't overstate the importance of the Nation's future prosperity in research and in innovation. One of my heroes, aerodynamicist named Theodore Von Karmen defined science and engineering in a couple of sentences one time, which I think is—I found to be very important. He said, ''Science is discovering what is and engineering is creating what never was.'' And that is basically what we are talking about. We are talking about discovery of new things and we are talking about creating things that don't exist now. And that is the underpinning of our commercial interests and future, of our health, of our defense interests. And in fact, if you look at our nation more and more it is relying on us being able to discover and to create like no other peoples in the nations can. Just an observation on what is happening in the Department of Defense and the new military will clarify that very clearly. Without research basically there is no reasonable progress. And innovation comes from basic research and it comes from the innovation applications of that research. Equally important is the looming shortage of scientists and engineers in this country that can do this work. In my point of view, this looming shortage of the workforce—the scientific and innovative workforce is even more important than research support itself. I think of an ancient Chinese proverb that says, ''If you buy a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.'' So we need to think about the long-term implications of creating a workforce that can actually carry us forward into the future in discovery and creativity in science and engineering.
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I will make my comments short today and just hit on a few points which actually many of which you have mentioned already. I would like to just enforce them. But basically NSF is the key government agency for funding basic research in this country and this prominence has become—is ever increasing over a period of time. Fewer and fewer other agencies and corporations are doing basic research. So this responsibility has been falling more and more onto NSF. That is why it is so critical that NSF steps up to support the Nation's future. And of course the training of scientists and engineers is also part of this, as I said before. So they actually go together. The workforce and the discovery and innovation go together. Some very key indicators; you mentioned earlier that 13 percent of top-rated NSF proposals go unfunded—13 percent. Some one of seven, one out of eight go unfunded. Now, on the one hand you might say that, well, that is okay. I mean you can't get everything you want. One out of 13, you know, that is not so bad. But I think if you think of it very carefully this is a crisis. This is a time we are trying to encourage people to go into science, into research, into innovation, and we want the best people, the best work to be supported if we are trying to encourage this to happen. So this is a problem not only that the work is not being done, but those young scientists and engineers are going to be discouraged if they can't get their proposals, their best work funded. So it is not that all work needs to be funded, but the best work needs to be funded. So that is a big problem.
Grant size and grant duration, as you mentioned, is a critical problem—NSF grants of $93,000 a year for less then three years, two plus years compared to NIH grants, which are $338,000 for almost five years, four plus years. We have a good opportunity to look at the difference of how these things work. Having been funded myself by NSF continuously between 1962 and the year 2000 I have a lot of experience, by the way, with writing these grant proposals. And it is a big problem. The problem is this. $93,000 is enough to support a little bit of the principle investigator a month in the summertime, one graduate student. No staff in the labs. No staff time in the offices. So basically you have this best in the country scientist or research engineer and the best in the country graduate student that is working with him doing lab technician work and doing office stenographic work because there isn't support of that kind of work. So you might say, well, it can be done, and of course, it has been done. It has been a long-standing problem. But you might ask yourself as a public policy issue whether it is a good idea to have the best in the country doing this kind of work. Is it the best use of their time and in fact does it encourage these people to go into this work and to make a career out of it. And if you compare it to NIH, which is longer durations and larger funding, it just works a lot better. So I think it is a very important idea.
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In terms of major equipment supports, we very much applaud the effort to increase the major equipment funding. I think this is desperately needed. There really is no other sources—there are no other sources of major equipment monies available to young scientists and engineers. That is just not going to be there if the NSF can't step up to this. We would encourage that in order to establish priorities that the priorities for this major equipment is established by the National Science Board. The National Science Board can create a list, a peer reviewed ranked list, of major equipment needs. And I think that would be the preferable way to go forward with supporting very large major equipment that would also provide some confidence that the money will be used in an appropriate way and let us say in a way that would stand the test of subsequent review.
Homeland security is very important. Many universities have people available to work on homeland security and they are looking for avenues. At the University of Maryland we have 120 faculty members in research activities dealing with homeland security and counter-terrorism and international security issues. They go from the soft sides in policy to the hard sides in computer science and identification. People are looking for this opportunity to participate. They are looking for avenues to participate in national defense and homeland security issues.
The student stipend issue of increasing of the stipends from $21,500 to—I think its $21,500 to $25,000 is very important as a mechanism for encouraging more excellent people to go into science and innovation as careers. As I said earlier, this is part of the workforce issue. We need to bring more people into this activity. Once again this depends on being able to increase the grant sizes to do the—to execute this problem.
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Just to touch on a couple of points in terms of how basic research benefits is an issue. I don't think it should be—require too much discussion on this. I will just mention a couple of things. At the University of Maryland our research expenditure is about 300 million—a little more than 300 million year, which is fairly large for a public research university without a medical school. And this has been increasing about 15 percent per year for the last now six years in a row. So we are definitely moving forward very rapidly. Just to mention a couple of points in terms of where the Nation has benefited from this, we have an Institute For Systems Research that basically developed a new standard for telephone line modems that allowed the data rate over modem communications to essentially double 28.8 kilobytes per second. And while you might say well, that is something, that is basically increasing the—doubling the rate of communication over the telephone lines across the entire globe, you know. It is like taking all the cars in your highways and driving them twice as fast. You know this is a big impact from an NSF sponsored research program.
Another NSF sponsored project with a young faculty member—once again, this is a young faculty member workforce issue where this faculty member got an atomic force microscope and basically is working on the force between bio-molecules—sorry—and mineral surfaces. And I will—I apologize for that—for taking too long on this. We kind of get wound up on these things. Let me just close by saying then that in summary your Authorization Bill, of course, is right on target. I think the major issues have to do with increasing the total funding available and of course I would say much heavier focus on workforce development issues in scientists and engineers. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Mote follows:]
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PREPARED STATEMENT OF C. DANIEL MOTE, JR.
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
My name is Dan Mote, and I am President of the University of Maryland, College Park, the flagship institution of the State of Maryland. I appreciate very much this opportunity to testify before the Subcommittee. I am speaking to you today as the president of a preeminent institution that has built its reputation of distinguished achievement on the impact of its research. I am also speaking as a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASUGLC), which together include universities in each of the 50 states that receive significant support from the National Science Foundation.
Speaking on behalf of the higher education and scientific communities, Chairman Smith, I want to report that we are delighted that you and Chairman Boehlert of the full Science Committee are calling for such significant increases in the NSF budget. I am here to offer you my full support for your proposed legislation and to take special note of the urgency of this action. You are major forces for science.
In the letter of invitation to testify today, I was asked to respond to three questions.
The first among these was: Please comment on the potential of this legislation to further NSF's mission of promoting and advancing progress in science and engineering across all disciplines. How would this legislation, should it be enacted, affect the Nation's overall research and development portfolio?
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NSF is the key government agency that funds basic research in many disciplines, and the importance of basic scientific research for the future of the country cannot be overstated. Basic research and the people who engage in basic research give the country its edge in scientific discovery; they underpin the technologies that will be essential to building our defense from terrorism at home and abroad; and they lay the foundation for the technological advances through knowledge and innovation that are primary to quality of life and economic prosperity.
The United States has clearly led the world in science and technology since World War II, but that leadership is threatened today by the looming shortage of scientists and engineers. If we don't move quickly to attract a much greater number of our young people into science and engineering, and prepare many of them for careers in research, our country will descend a slippery slope toward insufficient workforce to maintain a viable scientific and technological enterprise. Our NSF-funded research has been the proven base for building powerful research and training operations that have provided thousands of skilled people to work in federal agencies (ARL, NRL, NSA, DOE, DARPA, NASA, NIST, NIH) and in the private sector.
The events of 9/11 and the subsequent very real concerns with homeland security add even more urgency to the need to fund basic research. Maintaining a high level of expertise in basic science and technology allows the Nation to move relatively quickly as technological need changes abruptly. At the University of Maryland researchers in the Computer Sciences department, for example, are working on high speed human recognition systems and wireless communication systems, important technologies for security.
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Issues of security may lead to reductions in the number of international students and ultimately scientists and technologists we employ in the national research enterprise. For the past few decades, the United States research agenda has thrived in large part because of the numbers of international students studying in our graduate schools at universities across the country and remaining here to enrich our scientific and technological workforce. In our colleges of Engineering and Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences, international students compose half of the graduate student body. If we reduce their numbers significantly and, as is conceivable, restrict them substantially, we need to give immediate thought either to increasing the number of American citizens prepared for careers to replace them or to prepare for a society in which science and technology will no longer be preeminent. In fact, without top people in sufficient supply, our science and technology would not be first rate.
Funding for NSF can make the difference. Supporting the highest ranked research proposals by top quality people at our research universities is the only formula we know for supporting the scientific discoveries and producing the workforce we must have. It worked in the past. It will work now. We need to view this as a crisis whose magnitude has elevated substantially since 9/11.
As recommended by AAU, here are some of the goals that can be achieved with the funding levels called for in your legislation:
Advance core programs for research and education. One important indicator of the problem we face is the number of top-rated proposals not funded by NSF because of insufficient resources. Presently, that number is 13 percent. Top quality people whose proposals are not funded will seek other projects or leave the research enterprise. If we concentrate our top people in high-paying jobs in the commercial world, the research enterprise in federal research labs and research universities will be the loser. We need to keep the best in research by allowing them to work. The immediate appeal of AAU and the research community is for additional funding for these highest quality proposals. The proposed increase in your bill would enable more of the top-rated proposals and top-rated people to be funded and would also strengthen NSF's important education programs.
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Let me give you an example from my university. One of our star junior faculty members, an assistant professor in the Department of Geology, has developed a technique called biological forces microscopy to directly measure at the nanoscale the forces between a living cell (biomolecule) and a material surface. This basic research on the interface between biological and mineral surfaces is visionary work that fits NSF, though possibly not other agencies. This research has enormous implications to the environmental and medical sciences, with asbestos poisoning being just one example. His recent proposal to NSF in nanotechnology has been rated as top quality and recommended for funding. If resources at NSF cannot be found to fund his proposal, his ability to pursue this vitally important line of investigation will be in jeopardy.
Continue supporting key initiatives. Nanotechnology; biocomplexity; information technology research; workforce development (including math and science partnerships); mathematics research; and social and behavioral sciences have all been identified as fields ripe for advances and keys to the Nation's future. Your legislation would drive progress in these critical areas.
Increase grant size and duration. The average NSF grant awarded in FY 2001 was $93,000 and lasted for just under three years. By comparison, the average NIH grant in FY 2000 was $338,000 and lasted for just over four years. Increasing the size and length of time of grants will enable highly rated researchers to concentrate on discovery rather than paperwork. My own experience, as a researcher supported by NSF funding continuously from 1962 to 2000, is that small, sub three-year grants do not allow time or funding for a top researcher to achieve a level of productivity we should expect of their efforts. Small grants force top people to serve as office and lab staff since they can't hire support personnel; the short time period requires excessive time commitment, every other year, in preparation of proposals. All this can be done and is done. However, from a public policy perspective, is this really the best way to use the time of the Nation's most distinguished scientists and engineers? Your legislation will provide the welcome opportunity for NSF to increase grant size and duration and keep the best people working on the right things.
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Add funding for Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction and Major Research Instrumentation. Several proposals are pending for large-scale research resources that would provide benefits not only to the institution or region where the research project is located, but also to researchers throughout the United States and the world. Your legislation would hasten progress on these important capital projects, and provide criteria by which they can be judged on their merit. In FY 2001, the NSF Major Research Instrumentation program awarded $75 million, but many top-rated applications could not be funded. Your legislation would make possible additional needed research instrumentation—and these purchases will benefit the domestic economy, because almost all specialized research instrumentation is procured from American vendors.
Assist with homeland security and anti-terrorism efforts. The terrorist acts of September 11 have greatly increased recognition of the role of science and engineering in homeland security. Working closely with other federal agencies, NSF can enhance support for groundbreaking research into information security, detection of airborne hazards, structural studies to improve building safety, psychological effects of living with terrorism, wireless communications, and a broad range of other scientific areas. Your legislation would support grants in critical areas related to the War on Terrorism.
Increase graduate student stipends. Providing competitive compensation to graduate students will attract more qualified Americans to science and engineering careers and help address long-term workforce needs. First we need to attract them; then we need to keep them. With an additional $23 million above the FY 2002 appropriation, NSF can increase these stipends from $21,500 per year in FY 2002 to $25,000 in FY 2003. Your legislation would make this possible as well.
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The second question I was asked to address today was: How does basic research, including research done at the University of Maryland, benefit the Nation? What is the impact of NSF-sponsored research programs at the University of Maryland on the local and state economy?
The University of Maryland's total externally-sponsored research and outreach activities topped $300 million in FY 2001, and the University's growth of federal research expenditures over the last five years (1995–2000) is 45 percent, one of the highest rates of growth for an AAU university. The latest NSF summary of R&D expenditures at all universities and colleges by science and engineering fields, for FY 2000 shows that in amount of R&D expenditures, the University of Maryland is among the top recipients. Maryland ranked #13 in total R&D expenditures in engineering; and #10 in federally financed R&D expenditures in the physical sciences.
How has that funding been used? Let me give examples of two research units at the University of Maryland and their work. The Institute for Systems Research is a permanent unit of the University of Maryland created in 1985 by NSF as one of the first Engineering Research Centers. The Institute is a cross-disciplinary organization that addresses problems of national importance in control and communication for complex systems. Its innovations have impacted technology and society in diverse areas such as robotics, wireless communications, aerospace systems, manufacturing, artificial intelligence and transportation. Examples of significant research conducted by the ISR faculty and researchers follow.
Research at the University of Maryland produced an engine controller to eliminate stall in gas turbine jet engines. The ultimate goal of implementing stall-resistant jet engines will be achieved once actuator components are developed that can withstand the harsh operating environment of a jet engine.
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A technique for data compression developed at the University of Maryland has been implemented for data transmission over bandlimited communication links such as telephone lines. This technique led to the development of a new Standard for telephone line modems known as V.34 which doubled data transmission speeds to 28.8 k bits per second with profound global impact.
The NSF-sponsored work at the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory has developed new technologies for visualization of complex data sets. Implementations were built to display directory structures on computer hard drives, basketball player statistics, stock portfolios, business decision making, etc. One well-known product resulting from this work is the ''Map of the Market'' licensed by Wall Street firms.
The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), supported by major grants from NSF and by other agencies, focuses on the fundamental aspects of small structures and the reliability and utility of nanostructures. Nanotechnology, the building of machines at an atomic level, holds enormous potential for revolutionizing the fields of materials, electronics, medicine and health care, the environment and energy, biotechnology and agriculture, and national security. A result of our investment in basic sciences over the past 50 years, nanotechnology builds on technology and scientific advances in physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, materials science and biology.
The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Maryland has been a national leader in improving the scan-probe microscopy necessary for work at the atomic level and developing innovative applications of its use in nanotechnology. For example, MRSEC scientists worked with scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop the standard for measurements in nanotechnology.
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MRSEC scientists have used scanning-probe microscopy in conjunction with a focused ion beam to create and measure tiny capacitors by a process similar to sand blasting, except the ''sand'' particles are individual atomic ions so that material can be removed atomic layer by atomic layer. This technique is now being used in collaborations with industrial scientists to improve ferro-electric memories for applications in portable storage devices, such as smart cards.
MRSEC researchers using scan-probe microscopy have shown that ''traffic jams'' of electrical current can be directly observed around defects in wires in circuit boards. The new ability to observe these jams directly provides a tool for detecting a failure site before the failure occurs.
One more example shows the immediate value and long-term potential of many NSF funded projects. The College of Information Studies, in concert with University of Maryland Institute for Applied Computer Studies (UMIACS), the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Linguistics, Johns Hopkins, and IBM secured a National Science Foundation grant to work on access to the oral and video histories of Holocaust survivors created by the Shoah Foundation, which collected testimonies in 57 countries and 32 languages. It will use its material to promote understanding and help eliminate prejudice. The Maryland team and their colleagues will develop multi-lingual speech processing technology to provide easy access to this material. Because the collection is so large and complex, the project has the added value of accessing oral records and cross-language retrieval in general. This will have applicability in several strategic areas, including retrieving information from foreign languages in the Mid East and elsewhere as a way of contributing to national security and combating terrorism.
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I cannot overstate the importance to our nation's future prosperity of investment in basic scientific research and in the people who conduct this research. A study released last year by the prestigious Council On Competitiveness, which includes some of our nation's leading chief executives in industry and academia, called for an increasing commitment to innovation, particularly to federal investments in research and development funding as necessary ''just to maintain the position of the United States, much less improve [it] in relative terms.''
Innovation comes from basic research findings of the highest caliber in every field, creates all new opportunities, and is vital to them all. We applaud the funding Congress has approved for research in the biological and life sciences and celebrate the many advances that have resulted from this support. Research in the physical sciences, biological sciences, mathematics, and engineering is increasingly interdependent, and interdependence extends between them and the medical sciences. Medical technologies such as magnetic resonance imagery, ultrasound, and genomic mapping could not have occurred without underlying knowledge in biology, physics, mathematics, computer sciences, chemistry and engineering. Continuing significant medical advances, which are often, and increasingly, advances in technology, not in medicine per se, will require concomitant advances in the sciences and engineering.
Basic research is driving improvements in economic development too. Industries and private companies, state governments, and federal laboratories are entering into partnerships with universities at a rapid and increasing rate. Such partnerships expand the workforce and bring ideas to early application; they lead to new spin-off companies and make new jobs possible. In this knowledge economy our economic leadership depends on ideas and innovations. Universities and university research are a primary source for these ideas. They must be supported.
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According to an AAU analysis of the economic impact of NSF funding, $1M in research grants generates approximately 36 jobs. We currently have approximately $40M in NSF awards, which would yield about 1400 positions for the State and $80M in economic output impact. Industry-sponsored university research grows from a strong federally funded research base, which is more likely to yield products for commercialization, and the University accounts for the bulk of industry-sponsored public university research in Maryland. The University accounted for 44 percent of invention disclosures, 68 percent of patent applications, and 35 percent of patents issued to Maryland public universities in 1999 and is a major source of new company start-up activity.
Finally, I was asked to answer the following: What is the role of NSF funding in the education and training of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in the U.S.? How will this legislation affect education and training programs at institutions of higher education, including the University of Maryland, and what are your thoughts on how best these programs can be strengthened?
The National Science Foundation (NSF), the heart of the federal investment in basic scientific research, has had an extraordinary impact on American scientific discovery and technological innovation. It is the only federal agency with responsibility for research and education in all major scientific and engineering fields. Consequently, both directly and through grant-funded graduate research assistants and post-doctoral fellows NSF plays a lead role in the training of future scientists, mathematicians and engineers that provide the base of the federal and private sector creative workforce in high-tech areas. At Maryland the largest support for graduate research assistants from a single federal source (25 percent of our total funds) comes from NSF funding. The availability directly impacts the numbers of top quality graduate students we can attract.
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The School of Engineering has an aggressive focus on undergraduate education, and NSF support has led to several significant educational programs with a lasting positive impact. An example of an NSF-supported program highly successful in attracting talented undergraduates in Maryland to exciting research programs and research-oriented careers is MERIT (Maryland Engineering Research Internship Teams), an innovative team-based research project for undergraduates in telecommunications, computer systems and power and energy. The School has received an additional grant from NSF's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program in Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering, an important emerging field of study. Such programs are vital if we want to increase the number of young people interested in science.
Another compelling example is the work of Dr. Patricia Campbell, professor in Mathematics Education, principal investigator for ''Mathematics: Application and Reasoning Skills (MARS),'' a project funded by NSF, 1996–2001, for $6M. The project's goal was to develop a model for systemic reform in elementary mathematics across the Baltimore City Public School System and increase student achievement through teacher enhancement. The results are remarkable: between 1996 and 2000, the proficiency percentage as measured on state standardized tests increased by 71 percent in grade 3 and by 60 percent in grade 5. Performance on the Comprehensive Tests on Basic Skills national standardized tests was also remarkable: between 1998 and 2001 in the 107 schools participating, the average increase for grades 1–5 was over 100 percent.
NSF is widely recognized for excellence in the management of federal funds. Approximately 95 percent of the agency's total budget goes directly to support the actual conduct of research and education, while less than five percent is spent on administration and management. NSF was the only agency in the entire Federal Government to receive a ''green light'' for Financial Management in a review by the Treasury Department, General Accounting Office and Office of Management and Budget, published in the Administration's FY 2003 budget request. Consequently, I believe the primary way to help NSF better accomplish its objectives is a significant increase in funding.
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Two years ago, congressmen and senators from both parties set an ambitious and appropriate goal: to double the budget of NSF from its funding level in FY 2000 ($3.9 billion) to approximately $8 billion by FY 2005. For the past two years, Congress has voted strong support for this goal. AAU and the university community believe it is critical to build on this strong start now and continue to invest in research in which the pay-offs are so high for the citizens of the country. Your authorization bill will send a strong signal to the appropriators, the rest of the Congress, and the Administration that support for NSF is strong, it is bipartisan, and it is grounded in sound arguments.
I want to close by emphasizing the importance of competitive merit review. NSF's numerous scientific achievements are due both to the work of the principal investigators and to the agency's use of merit review for allocating research funding. We believe that merit review must continue to be the method NSF uses to allocate research funds, since this process has helped produce the discoveries and advances from which the Nation has benefited. It works.
Thank you for your leadership on these issues, and for the opportunity to provide this testimony.
Chairman SMITH. Thank you. Dr. Miaoulis.
STATEMENT OF DR. IOANNIS (YANNIS) MIAOULIS, PROFESSOR, MECHANICAL ENGINEERING; DEAN, SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND ASSOCIATE PROVOST, TUFTS UNIVERSITY
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Dr. MIAOULIS. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee. My name is Ioannis Miaoulis. I am a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Dean of the School of Engineering and Associate Provost at Tuffs University, Massachusetts, and I am also a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Although my written testimony addresses both research and education effects of the legislation, today I will focus my presentation on the effects of the proposed legislation on engineering education and training programs in universities like Tufts and the effects of this legislation on improving K–12 science and engineering educational programs and encouraging partnerships between K–12 schools and universities. Two of the most major challenges that our nation's engineering schools face today are attracting and retaining students in general and most specifically women and students of color. Although the demand for engineering graduates has increased dramatically, engineering enrollments have decreased by approximately 15 percent during the last 8 years. In addition, the percentages of students of color and women are quite small. Approximately 18 percent of the undergraduate engineering population nationally is female. It is difficult to attract engineering students yet it is more challenging to retain them. It is customary for an engineering school to lose 30 to 50 percent of its students. At Tufts we have reversed both of these trends and I strongly believe that without the support we received by the National Science Foundation we would not have been able to succeed.
Funding by NSF has enabled us to reshape our curriculum and make it attractive to both men and women. During the last 8 years our application pool doubled. The average SAT score of our incoming students increased by 70 points, which increased exceeding 1400. Also the number of women students by 26 percent. About a third of our undergraduate students are women and the 4-year graduated rate of women students is over 95 percent.
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Through a grant received in the early 90's from the Division of Undergraduate Education of NSF, we were able to change the engineering curriculum so in the first year students take courses designed to introduce engineering in an interesting and playful way. We now have a pool of over 60 engineering courses that stem from personal research interests and hobbies of our faculty. We used to have a net loss of 15 percent of our undergraduates. With NSF-funded curriculum, we have managed to become the only engineering school in the country where more students transfer into engineering from liberal arts than from engineering into liberal arts. We actually see an increase in our class size most years.
Let me now address the effects of the proposed legislation on improving K–12 science and engineering education programs and encouraging partnerships between K–12 schools and universities. NSF is the most significant supporter of technology and scientific literacy in our nation. For the last 15 years, the Tufts School of Engineering has the national leader in engineering and science outreach in pre-K–12 schools. At Tufts, our goal is to introduce engineering as the new discipline in all pre-K–12 public and private schools in the U.S. and make engineering an equally appealing and exciting discipline to both boys and girls. The National Science Foundation has been the strongest supporter of these efforts. Massachusetts is now the first state in the Nation to require, through standards-based programs and testing, engineering as a discipline, starting at a kindergarten level. Many other states have expressed interest in following Massachusetts innovative step.
Why introduce engineering to all young children? Technological literacy has become basic literacy. Most of the tangible products, such as cars, telephones, and airplanes and processes with which we spend most of our lives are technologies that resulted from engineering efforts. A literate citizen is one that understands the world around her. Engineering offers an excellent platform for project problem-based engineering and helps children integrate knowledge from all disciplines including math, science, social science, language art and art. And engineering motivates to pursue math and science hobbies by showing the relevance and value to day-to-day life. And engineering sharpens young people's ability to visualize and think in three dimensions.
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An initial prototype program was a partnership between our school of engineering and the Stow Schools of the Nashoba Regional School District in Massachusetts. This effort was funded by NSF. Our success in changing the science performance of the children within two years is evident through the results of the statewide science tests at the fourth grade level. In two years we managed to increase the percent of children that scored ''Advanced'' from 6 percent to 31 percent. The state average for ''Advanced'' is 10 percent. In 93 percent of the children in the district that NSF funded scored ''Advanced'' or ''Proficient.'' Our partnership worked well.
We need to enhance funding for the University-School Partnerships program. We also need to include engineering in the National Mathematics and Science Education Partnerships. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers have endorsed such partnerships. I encourage the committee to propose a change to the name in charge of the partnerships to ''National Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Partnership,'' and to propose a significant increase of the funding of this NSF program. In closing, I feel that the proposed NSF budget increases move us in the right direction in enhancing basic research, promoting diverse representation in the field, and promoting technological literacy of the citizens of tomorrow, and I fully endorse the proposed reauthorization Bill. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Miaoulis follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF IOANNIS (YANNIS) MIAOULIS
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee,
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Good Morning. My name is Yannis Miaoulis. I am a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Dean of Engineering and Associate Provost at Tufts University in Massachusetts. I am also a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. I would like to thank you for your invitation to appear before the Committee today to provide my perspective concerning the potential of the proposed legislation to further National Science Foundation's (NSF's) mission of promoting and advancing progress and education in science and engineering.
Before I begin with my specific remarks I would like to state my admiration and appreciation of the interest and support of the Congress and particularly the House Science Committee to enhancing the important role of the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation through its numerous investments in research and education, has made this nation stronger, and better educated. At Tufts University we are particularly proud of NSF's contributions since the founder of NSF, Dr. Vannevar Bush, was one of our own Engineering students and graduates. His assistant in starting the National Science Foundation, Prof. Lloyd Trefethen, was actually my undergraduate advisor and mentor while I was an undergraduate at Tufts.
Today, I would like to focus my comments on three issues:
The potential effect of this legislation on the Nation's overall research and development portfolio and the benefits of NSF-funded basic research, including research done at Tufts University.
The effects of the proposed legislation on science and engineering education and training programs in universities such as Tufts
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The effects of this legislation on improving K–12 science and engineering education programs and encouraging partnerships between K–12 schools and universities
The potential effect of this legislation on the Nation's overall research and development portfolio and the benefits of NSF-funded basic research, including research done at Tufts University
During the past few years, there has been a significant shift of the sources of basic research from industry research facilities to university and national laboratories. Industries are focusing more and more on applied research and development with near-term high return on investment. A major contributor of the growth of the U.S. economy during the second part of the last century was federal investment in basic scientific research. Investments in the areas of physical science and engineering have resulted in the best science and technology program in the world. Investments in these areas have also advanced other areas of science and even human health. A significant component of the research, which culminated with the development of the CAT scan was conducted in our Physics department at Tufts under the late Prof. Cormack who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1980. Clearly computer science, mathematics, physics, and engineering are essential to the advancement of human health and provide the foundation for new discoveries in biomedical science. However funding for the physical sciences and engineering has remained level, while the increase being proposed for the NIH for FY 2003 alone is more than two thirds of the current total FY 2002 NSF budget. Our nation has an unbalanced R&D portfolio, favoring the Life Sciences. Underfunding the physical and engineering sciences will in the long run have a detrimental effect on the life sciences.
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Inventions and discoveries that help humanity, such as X-ray machines and Penicillin, often occur serendipitously. From my personal experience, the National Science Foundation has been critical in supporting basic and applied research activities in my laboratory that has continued to lead from one exciting discovery to another. Moreover, the winding sequence of findings has been supported by a variety of NSF programs that defy logic. I began my research in studying thermal processing to recrystallize silicon films used for the microelectronics industry. This research was supported by the Engineering Directorate at NSF and has helped to improve the way we make computer chips. The research also led to an interesting discovery whereby minute changes in film thickness resulted in large changes in heat absorption and quality of the crystal.
This fascinating phenomenon appeared to be a powerful means of controlling the thermal process. As an aside, I wondered whether nature had taken advantage of this phenomenon. Asking a graduate student to take a leap of faith, we delved into an exploration to find examples of biological thin films that utilize the phenomenon. We found that butterflies do in fact have thin films optimized to serve multi-functions as signaling as well as collecting solar energy. The NSF Biology Division funded a project to develop an innovative tool to examine these structures. Our results found an amazing array of complex thin film structures, some that looked like spherical mirrors and others like pine trees in a forest. Why and how these structures are created is a subject of interest and debate among academic communities.
These complex structures inspired my research team to look into emerging research areas in microelectromechanical systems and nanotechnologies. How can we create these microscale structures in innovative ways to serve interesting engineering functions? NSF's Engineering Directorate again is supporting my team's research into rapid manufacturing of microscale and mesoscale structures. This research may lead to new means of developing sensors and actuators to be used in Homeland Security as pathogen detectors or to create high throughput scanners to discover life saving drugs. Through NSF's support of basic and applied research, we have been able to make a number of key findings that have linked together progressively.
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Other Tufts engineering faculty have obtained NSF support for fundamental studies into fibrous protein structure assembly for the past six years. These studies are supported through the Divisions of Materials Research, Bioengineering and Biology. The scientific insights gained from these studies have provided an improved understanding of this important family of structural proteins (e.g., collagens, silks). This information has led to the direct use of these proteins in new biomaterials applications and in new tissue engineering studies. The result of these efforts have included a variety of clinically relevant studies supported through the NIH, new interdisciplinary studies and opportunities for undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate students, and new spin-off companies based on the findings. Other engineering faculty at Tufts are working on NSF-funded projects that will revolutionize mammography techniques by using optical spectroscopy for imaging of human tissues.
Although we have had our successes in attracting NSF funds for conducting basic research, we have had numerous disappointing moments. Many good ideas that are submitted and are rated excellent by the majority of the reviewers do not get funded. And the funding for the fortunate ones is limited in duration and annual amount. In his March 12, 2002 testimony before your committee, Dr. Stephen Director from the University of Michigan, presented detailed statistics of this problem. The proposed legislation will enable NSF to fund more great ideas at a higher funding level and duration. The Nation's creative minds should spend more time focusing on their research and less time trying to get funding.
The effects of the proposed legislation on science and engineering education and training prams in Universities such as Tufts
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Two of the most major challenges that our nation's engineering schools face today are attracting and retaining students in general, and more specifically women and students of color. Although the demand for engineering graduates has increased dramatically, engineering enrollments have decreased by approximately 15 percent during the last eight years. In addition, the percentages of students of color and women are quite small. Approximately 18 percent of the undergraduate engineering population nationally is female. It is difficult to attract engineering students, yet it is more challenging to retain them. It is customary for an engineering school to lose 30%–50% of its undergraduate population during the undergraduate years. At Tufts we have reversed both of these trends, and I strongly believe that without the support we received from NSF we would not have been able to succeed.
Most students do not drop out of Engineering because they cannot handle the work. In fact, the national average grade point average of female students transferring out of Engineering is a B+. They transfer out because they simply do not find the field interesting. Unfortunately most of them transfer out during their first year, before they have taken any engineering courses. Through a grant we received in the early 90's from the Division of Undergraduate Education of NSF we were able to change the engineering curriculum so that in their first year, students take courses designed to introduce engineering in an interesting and playful way. We now have a pool of over 60 engineering courses that stem from personal research interests and hobbies of our faculty. We have courses focusing on acoustics (Design and Performance of Musical Instruments), Fluid Mechanics (Life in Moving Fluids), Heat Transfer (Gourmet Engineering), Biotechnology, and Digital Image Processing. They are taught by our best teachers with passion, since they were created by them and focus on their personal interest. We use to have a net loss of 15 percent of our undergraduates. With this NSF funded curriculum we managed to become the only engineering school in the country where more students transfer into engineering from liberal arts than from engineering to liberal arts. We actually see an increase in our class size most years.
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Funding by the National Science Foundation has enabled us to reshape our curriculum and make it attractive to both men and women. We were able to adjust our pedagogies in laboratory activities to better deliver the content to our students, and provide them with numerous opportunities to engage in research through NSF's Research Experiences for Undergraduate program. As a result, our program grew to be very desirable. During the last eight years, our application pool doubled, the average SAT scores of our incoming students increased by 70 points exceeding 1400, and the high school graduation ranking of our students decreased from top 13 percent of their class to top 5 percent of their class. Also the number of women students increased by 26 percent. About a third of our undergraduate students are women. The four-year graduation rate of our women students is over 95 percent.
Although we received a number of grants from NSF to be able to accomplish this, we had many, many excellent proposals rejected simply because of lack of funds. Just imagine the impact that NSF grants could have nationally in attracting and retaining engineering students if the Undergraduate Division had more funds to award. Many other engineering schools can design and implement programs such as the one that transformed our school.
The effects of this legislation on improving K–12 science and engineering education prams and encouraging partnerships between K–12 schools and universities
NSF is the most significant supporter of technological and scientific literacy in our nation. For the last fifteen years, the Tufts School of Engineering has been a national leader in Engineering and Science outreach in pre-K–12 schools. We have re-architected entire K–8 science curricula of public school districts, written textbooks that are currently used by millions of middle-school children, created Robolab, a Lego-based educational product that is used by more in more than 15,000 classrooms in twenty different countries and won numerous international awards. Our goal is to introduce engineering as the new discipline in all pre-K–12 public and private schools in the U.S. and make engineering an equally appealing and exciting discipline to both girls and boys. The National Science Foundation has been the biggest supporter of these efforts. Massachusetts is now the first state in the Nation to require, through standards-based programs and testing, engineering as a discipline, starting at the kindergarten level. Many other states have expressed interest in following Massachusetts' innovative step.
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Of course, not all children want to become, or should become engineers and scientists. While our nation desperately needs more engineers and scientists who would clearly benefit from engineering education beginning in grade school, why introduce engineering to all young children?
Technological literacy has become basic literacy. Most of the tangible products such as cars, telephones, and airplanes, and processes with which we spend most of our lives, are technologies that resulted from engineering efforts. A literate citizen is one that understands the world around her. Children need to understand the engineering process and the results of these processes: the technologies, in order to become fully literate in our complex, human-made world.
Engineering offers an excellent platform for project/problem-based learning. Children have opportunities to move from observing and formulating ideas to constructing projects and communicating about their work. This problem/project-based learning helps children integrate knowledge from all disciplines, including math, science, social studies, English, and art.
Engineering motivates students to pursue math and science studies. Partnerships among math, science and technology/engineering educators make for powerful teaching teams. Engineering brings math and science alive and creates links to everyday life. This important relevance factor encourages girls in particular, who typically chose profession that ''make a difference, to pursue careers in these male-dominated professions.
Engineering sharpens young people's ability to visualize and think in three dimensions. Rather than exploring three-dimensional objects by building with models or taking apart radios, most children watch television, play computer games, and surf the Internet, building skills that sharpen eye-hand coordination in two dimensions. We are raising generations of people that cannot visualize things in three dimensions. By nurturing both spatial visualization and communication skills, engineering enhances children's ability to design and present ideas in graphical form. These skills improve students' understanding of the technological world, and enable them to become the problem-solvers and designers of tomorrow.
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NSF has been very supportive of our effort to introduce engineering into the lives of younger people. We currently are working at the state level with the Massachusetts Department of Education, with teachers through the professional associations, with targeted school districts, and with children. Our initial prototype program was a partnership between our School of Engineering and the Stow Schools of the Nashoba Regional School District in Massachusetts. This effort was funded by two different grants, from the Engineering Division, and the Human Resources division of NSF. Our success in changing the science performance of the children within two years is evident through the results of the state-wide Science and Technology/Engineering tests at the fourth grade level. In 1998 6 percent of the 4th grade students scored ''Advanced,'' 66 percent ''Proficient,'' 27 percent ''Needs Improvement,'' and 1 percent ''Failed.'' In 2000, 31 percent scored ''Advanced,'' 62 percent ''Proficient,'' 7 percent ''Needs Improvement,'' and 0 percent failed. The State averages in these categories stayed quite flat. The state averages for 2000 are 5 percent ''Advanced,'' 37 percent ''Proficient,'' 32 percent ''Needs Improvement,'' and 26 percent Failed. Our partnership worked well. Enhanced NSF funding in these areas, can help other university-school partnership achieve similar results.
We need enhanced funding for the University-School Partnerships program. We also need to include ENGINEERING in the National Mathematics and Science Education Partnerships. Engineering Schools can energize teachers at all levels and significantly enhance math, science, and technology/engineering pre-K–12 literacy. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has endorsed partnerships as a method to improve K–12 Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education. I encourage the Committee to propose a change to the name and charge of the Partnerships to ''National Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Partnerships'' and to propose a significant increase of the funding of this NSF program. In addition, I encourage the Committee to also propose full funding for Math, Science, and Engineering education at the Department of Education as well. We have a unique opportunity to significantly enhance this important area of national interest. In closing, I feel that the proposed NSF budget increases moves us in the right direction in enhancing basic research, promoting diverse representation in the field, and promoting technological literacy of the citizens of tomorrow. I fully endorse your proposed re-authorization bill.
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BIOGRAPHY FOR IOANNIS (YANNIS) MIAOULIS
Dr. Ioannis (Yannis) Miaoulis graduated with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Tufts University, Summa Cum Laude, in three years. He received a Master of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT. He then returned to Tufts where he received a Master of Arts in economics and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Miaoulis started his academic career in 1987 as an Assistant Professor in the mechanical engineering department at Tufts, where he is now a full tenured Professor. He was named Associate Dean of the School of Engineering in 1993 and Dean in 1994. He served as interim Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and was appointed Associate Provost in 2001. He is the founder of the Tufts Thermal Analysis of Material Processes Laboratory, the Tufts Comparative Biomechanics Laboratory, the Engineering Project Development Center, the Center for Engineering Educational Outreach, and the Tufts Entrepreneurial Leadership Program.
Miaoulis holds a firm belief that the biggest ''treasures'' in solving real-world problems lie in the crevices between disciplines. In his capacity as Associate Provost, Miaoulis facilitates inter-school collaborations and seeks to bridge the gaps between fields. He oversees major University initiatives, such as the Tufts University Center for Children, the Institute on Aging, the Tufts Institute for the Environment, the Africa Forum, the Tufts Institute for Global Security, and the Tufts Statistics Project.
During his tenure as Dean of the School of Engineering:
the number of undergraduate applications doubled and the number of early decision applications tripled
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the SAT scores of incoming students increased by 70 points, and the rank order improved from the top 13 percent to the top 6 percent
the School became the only one in the country where during most years, more students transferred into engineering than out of it, while the average engineering school loses about a third of its class to liberal arts
the number of women students increased by 26 percent, and the number of female faculty almost tripled; currently the number of female students is almost double, and the number of female faculty is four times the national average
the number of student victories in regional and national undergraduate research and design competitions has doubled
the number of junior faculty that received national awards increased four-fold
major collaborative research initiatives such as in the area of Bioengineering were developed and the School's research volume doubled
the School developed and instituted an ambitious five-year strategic plan that has dramatically expanded the School's worldwide visibility
the School adopted an innovative curriculum that includes engaging half-courses for first-year engineering and liberal arts students, and developed a collaborative internship program with industry partners
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the School created new interdisciplinary educational, research, and degree programs with Arts & Sciences, the School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Schools of Medicine, Dental and Veterinary Medicine
the School raised over $100,000,000 in gifts and sponsored programs, including the largest gift in the history of the University, almost tripling the previous eight-year period achievement
the School renovated and built new facilities including a state-of-the-art-teaching auditorium and classrooms, the Pollution Prevention Laboratory, the Multimedia Arts Laboratory, the Rapid Prototyping Laboratory, the Environmental Engineering Laboratories, and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science facilities.
Miaoulis currently directs or co-directs numerous projects aimed at enhancing pre-K–12 science and technology/engineering education. Many of these initiatives focus on gender equity in the classroom and on introducing engineering in the earlier grades. He has developed curricula and educational materials which are used worldwide by thousands of schools. He spearheaded the introduction of engineering into the Massachusetts science and technology/engineering public school curriculum and is now working with other states to expand this effort nationally. His activities have been funded by a number of sources including the National Science Foundation, Intel Corporation, the Noyce Foundation, Prentice Hall, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lufkin Trust, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Miaoulis has received many awards for his research, teaching, and involvement in pre-K–12 science education, including the Presidential Young Investigator Award and the Outstanding Young Leader award. For five years, he served on the Massachusetts Math and Science Advisory Board; he is currently Chair of the Massachusetts Technology/Engineering Advisory Board.
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Miaoulis has a wide range of research and teaching interests, including microscale heat transfer phenomena, air pollution prevention, materials processing, and comparative biomechanics. He has authored over 100 refereed articles and given more than 80 invited and contributed presentations at conferences and events. His work is often featured in the popular press.
Chairman SMITH. Thank you. Dr. Friedman.
STATEMENT OF DR. JEROME I. FRIEDMAN, PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS, MASSACHUSETS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Dr. FRIEDMAN. Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear at this hearing to present my views about the National Science Foundation. At the outset, let me express my appreciation for the sustained support that you and the other Members of the House Science Committee have provided for the NSF and for your commitment to improving NSF's ability to serve our national interests. I believe that this Subcommittee is showing great wisdom by supporting a 15 percent increase for the NSF budget in each of the next three years. In preparing the recommendation, Mr. Chairman, I hope that you will highlight the importance of core research programs since they provide the basis for all of NSF's high priority areas.
My testimony today concerns two closely related issues: NSF's role in the development and operation of scientific facilities and the NSF's Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction program, which was established to support the construction of such facilities. To provide a context for my observations and recommendations, let me begin by underscoring the extent to which science has changed since NSF's founding a little more than 50 years ago.
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Through the first half of the 20th century, industrial laboratories accounted for most of the research in the United States, both applied and basic. World War II changed the picture dramatically and by the early 1960's the Federal Government was sponsoring two-thirds of all American research activity. Excluding the work performed under contract by the defense industry, most of those Federal funds supported research carried out by relatively small academic groups. Almost all the researchers were American citizens, and for the most part they worked in on-site university laboratories in self-contained scientific disciplines.
The world of science in the 21st Century is remarkably differently. Industry now counts for more than two-thirds of R&D spending. But unlike the early post-war period when Bell Labs and other private-sector facilities played starring roles in the basic research endeavor, industry now focuses almost strictly on short-term applied research. Today corporations rely heavily on basic research carried out by university scientists who are funded almost exclusively by the Federal Government. For that reason, agencies, such as the NSF, currently play an even more critical role in the science and technology enterprise than they did 50 years ago.
It is important to recognize that the way in which university science is conducted has also changed significantly. Research groups are larger. The equipment is far more complex. And many scientists carry our their research at national facilities. The scientific disciplines are also far less disjoint. They have become intertwined and highly interdependent. Federal funding of basic research has tried to keep pace with the changing scientific landscape. Programs that cut across disciplines such as the nanoscience, nanotechnology initiative have become integral to the Federal research portfolio. And large facilities, such as X-ray light sources and high-resolution telescopes have become essential to the federally supported research enterprise.
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Although its focus remains the university individual investigator, NSF today supports major facilities where many of the scientists carry out their research. The Cornell Electron Storage Ring with its associated X-ray light source is one of the early examples. It has been an extremely productive facility and currently services particle and condense matter physicists as well as structural biologists.
By constructing and operating major facilities can have a substantial impact on NSF's overall programming. To prevent such projects from overwhelming the NSF budget and causing irreparable damage to the individual investigator core programs, NSF established the MREFC account a few years ago. It is a very worthwhile concept, but I believe it is still suffering from growing pains. While MREFC projects undergo close scrutiny in a competitive peer review process, NSF currently does not provide the science community or Congress with a prioritized list of approved projects. The lack of transparency has prevented orderly planning by the research community. As a result, science has suffered and international research partners have been left dangling.
The Rare Symmetry Violating Processes Project is a good example. Conceived almost five years ago, it passed the rigors of peer review. It was placed on a to-do list by the National Science Board. The scientists involved were assured that if their project didn't make it into the FY 2002 budget it would almost certainly be in the FY 2003 Presidential request. Neither happened. And 15 million dollars in foreign contributions is about to vaporize. Since the collaboration's international partners are understandably losing faith in the selection process.
To remedy the MREFC difficulties, I suggest that the NSF be required annually to submit to Congress the full list of approved projects in a prioritized order that has been established with the concurrence of the National Science Board. The NSF should provide an explanation of the criteria used for setting the priorities and a statement of its reasons for any deviations from the priorities it sets the previous year.
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The NSF should also be requested to present a long-range strategic budget that takes into account the operation of the facilities it plans to construct. Otherwise, course program budgets could be jeopardized when operating funds are needed to bring a new facility online. I would also like to emphasize that core program and MREFC funds should not be commingled, either in planning or in practice. Finally, for management and oversight purposes, NSF's annual budget should have a separate line for facilities operation and all projected facilities operation costs and MREFC construction costs should be presented each year as part of a rolling 5-year plan.
In concluding my remarks, I would like to state that the National Science Foundation Reauthorization Act of 2002 properly recognizes the great importance of National Science Foundation in advancing both science and education in our nation. In addressing some of the issues that I have mentioned, this legislation also contains features that will increase the effectiveness with which the NSF can carry out its mission.
The NSF is a national treasure. It stands as a model of peer-reviewed science and individual investigator research. Its financial and programmatic health is essential to our nation's future. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Friedman follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF JEROME I. FRIEDMAN
Mr. Chairman, Ms. Johnson, Members of the Subcommittee, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to appear at this hearing to present my views about the National Science Foundation. At the outset, let me express my appreciation for the sustained support that you and other Members of the House Science Committee have provided for the NSF and for your commitment to improving NSF's ability to serve our national interests. I believe that this subcommittee is showing great wisdom by supporting a 15 percent increase for the NSF budget in each of the next three years. In preparing your recommendations, Mr. Chairman, I hope that you will highlight the importance of the core research programs, since they provide the basis for all of NSF's high-priority areas.
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My testimony today concerns two closely related issues: NSF's role in the development and operation of scientific facilities and the NSF's Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) program, which was established to support the construction of such facilities. To provide a context for my observations and recommendations, let me begin by underscoring the extent to which science has changed since NSF's founding a little more than fifty years ago.
During the first half of the 20th century, industrial laboratories accounted for most of the research in the United States, both applied and basic. World War II changed the picture dramatically, and by the early 1960's, the Federal Government was sponsoring two-thirds of all American research activity. Excluding work performed under contract by the defense industry, most of those federal funds supported research carried out by relatively small academic groups. Almost all the researchers were American citizens, and for the most part they worked in on-site university laboratories in self-contained scientific disciplines.
The world of science in the 21st century is remarkably different. Industry now accounts for more than two-thirds of R&D spending. But unlike the early post war period, when Bell Labs and other private-sector facilities played starring roles in the basic research endeavor, industry now focuses almost strictly on short-term applied research. Today, corporations rely heavily on basic research carried out by university scientists, who are funded almost exclusively by the Federal Government. For that reason, agencies, such as the NSF, currently play an even more critical role in the science and technology enterprise than they did fifty years ago.
It is important to recognize that the way in which university science is conducted has also changed significantly. Research groups are larger. Equipment is far more complex, and many scientists carry out their research at national facilities. The scientific disciplines are also far less disjoint: they have become intertwined and highly interdependent.
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Federal funding of basic research has tried to keep pace with the changing scientific landscape. Programs that cut across disciplines, such as the Nanoscience/Nanotechnology Initiative, have become integral to the federal research portfolio. And large facilities, such as X-ray light sources and high-resolution telescopes, have become essential to the federally supported research enterprise.
Although its focus remains the university individual investigator, NSF today supports major facilities where many of these scientists carry out their research. The Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), with its associated X-ray light source (CHESS), is one of the early examples. It has been an extremely productive facility and currently serves particle and condensed matter physicists, as well as structural biologists.
But constructing and operating major facilities can have a substantial impact on NSF's overall programming. To prevent such projects from overwhelming the NSF budget and causing irreparable damage to the individual investigator core programs, NSF established the MREFC account a few years ago. It is a very worthwhile concept, but I believe that it is still suffering from growing pains. While MREFC projects undergo close scrutiny in a competitive peer-review process, NSF currently does not provide the science community or Congress with a prioritized list of approved projects. The lack of transparency has prevented orderly planning by the research community. As a result, science has suffered and international research partners have been left dangling.
The Rare Symmetry Violating Processes (RSVP) project is a good example. Conceived almost five years ago, it passed the rigor of peer review and was placed on a ''to-do list'' by the National Science Board (NSB). The scientists involved were assured that if their project didn't make it into the FY 2002 budget, it would almost certainly be in the FY 2003 presidential request. Neither happened, and $15 million in foreign contributions is about to vaporize, since the collaboration's international partners are understandably losing faith in the selection process.
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To remedy the MREFC difficulties, I suggest that the NSF be required annually to submit to Congress the full list of approved projects in a prioritized order that has been established with the concurrence of the NSB. The NSF should provide an explanation of the criteria used for setting these priorities and a statement of its reasons for any deviations from the priorities it set the previous year.
The NSF should also be requested to present a long-range strategic budget that takes into account the operation of the facilities it plans to construct. Otherwise core program budgets could be jeopardized when operating funds are needed to bring a new facility on line. I would also like to emphasize that core program and MREFC funds should not be co-mingled, either in planning or in practice. Finally, for management and oversight purposes, NSF's annual budget should have a separate line for facilities operation; and all projected facilities operation costs and MREFC construction costs should be presented each year as part of a rolling five-year plan.
In concluding my remarks, I would like to state that the National Science Foundation Reauthorization Act of 2002 properly recognizes the great importance of the National Science Foundation in advancing both science and education in our nation. In addressing some of issues that I have mentioned, this legislation also contains features that will increase the effectiveness with which the NSF can carry out its mission.
The NSF is a national treasure. It stands as a model of peer-reviewed science and individual investigator research. Its financial and programmatic health is essential to our nation's future.
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BIOGRAPHY FOR JEROME ISAAC FRIEDMAN
Personal: Jerome Isaac Friedman, 75 Greenough Street, Brookline, MA 02146
Date of Birth: March 28, 1930
Education:
1947–1956—University of Chicago
1956—Ph.D.
1953—M.S.
1950—A.B.
Work Experience:
1956–1957—Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, Research Associate
1957–1960—High Energy Physics Laboratory, Stanford University, Research Associate
1960–present—Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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1960–1964—Assistant Professor
1964–1967—Associate Professor
1967– —Professor of Physics
1980–1983—Director, Laboratory for Nuclear Science
1983–1988—Head, Physics Department
1988– —William A. Coolidge Professor
1990– —Institute Professor
Research Interests:
Experimental High Energy and Elementary Particle Physics
Professional Societies:
American Physical Society; American Association for the Advancement of Science
Committees and Panels:
1965–1967—Program Advisory Committee, Cambridge Electron Accelerator
1967–1970—Program Advisory Committee, Princeton-Penn Accelerator
1969—Chairman, Program Advisory Committee, Princeton-Penn Accelerator
1971–1973—Program Advisory Committee, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
1973–1977—Program Advisory Committee, M.I.T. Bates Linear Accelerator
1971–1974—Program Advisory Committee, Wilson Laboratory, Cornell University
1974–1977—Chairman, Program Advisory Committee, M.I.T. Bates Linear Accelerator
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1977–1983—Board Member, Universities Research Association
1978–1980—PEP Policy Committee, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
1978–1980—Chairman, Scientific Committee, Universities Research Association
1978–1982—Scientific Policy Committee, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
1980–1983—Vice-Chairman of the Board, Universities Research Association
1986–1989—URA Visiting Committee
1988–1992—High Energy Advisory Panel Department of Energy
1989—Chairman, URA Visiting Committee
1989—Physics Department Visiting Committee, Harvard University
1989—SSC Director Search Committee
1989—Chairman, SSC Scientific Policy Committee
1991—Board on Physics and Astronomy, National Research Council
1991—Princeton Plasma Physics Advisory Council
1991–1992—Program Committee for International High Energy Conference (Dallas)
1992–1992—HEPAP Subpanel on the U.S. Program of High Energy Physics Research
1992—Physics Department Visiting Committee, Brown University
1992—Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Advisory Council
1992–1995—Chairman of Physics Department Visiting Committee, Harvard University
1992–1995—Member of the Nominating Committee of the Section on Physics, AAAS
1993—Advisory Committee to the Rocky Mountain Consortium for High Energy Physics
1993—Executive Committee of Board on Physics and Astronomy, National Research Council
1995—Nuclear Physics Review Committee, Hampton University
1996—Board Member, University Research Association
1996–2002—Scientific Policy Committee, CERN
1996—Physics Planning Committee, American Physical Society
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1997—Member of the KEK Council
1997—Vice President, American Physical Society
1997—Trustee of the Dibner Institute
1998—President Elect, American Physical Society
1999—President, American Physical Society
2000—Chair Elect, Council of Scientific Society Presidents
2001—Chair, Council of Scientific Society Presidents
2002—Advisory Board, Technology Review
Honors
1980—American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1988—William A. Coolidge Professor of Physics
1989—W.K.H. Panofsky Prize, 1989 American Physical Society (awarded jointly with H.W. Kendall and R.E. Taylor)
1990—Nobel Prize in Physics (awarded jointly with H.W. Kendall and R.E. Taylor)
1991—Institute Professor
1991—Honorary Doctor of Science, Trinity College
1992—National Academy of Sciences
1992—Fellow of the American Physical Society
1992—Fellow of AAAS
1994—Alumni Medal, University of Chicago
1997—Honorary Fellowship, Institute of Physics, Singapore
2000—President's Medal, Institute of Physics
2001—Honorary Degree, State University of New York, Albany.
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79375c.eps
Discussion
Chairman SMITH. Thank you, Dr. Friedman. Thank you all. We will each take five minutes. We will try to stick fairly closely to allowing each individual five minutes of questions. Whatever you might have left out, Dr. Mote, you can sort of weave into your answers to whatever the questions are. Let me start with the fact that competition for money is going to be much more aggressive as we deal with what happened September 11 and national security certainly is a top regard. We have a Government Performance and Result Act that says we are going to start allowing appropriations that are going to be somewhat based on performance and results. Each of you maybe just give us your impression how to best measure performance and results within NSF, of course with the challenge that sometimes you don't know the consequences of our basic research efforts until many years later. Peer review certainly is exceptional. You can measure that. How do we measure performance and results about the money we are putting into basic research. Dr. Mote, start with you for a quick comment and then go down the line.
Dr. MOTE. I think that-to do this NSF has been here 50 years so I think one can take a long-term view, which is necessary, when talking about the results of basic research. And I think that view should definitely include manpower review as well as technology impact.
Chairman SMITH. By manpower you mean students staying in for graduate work?
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Dr. MOTE. I think faculty members—current faculty members like myself—a person like myself who has basically been created by NSF. I mean I would not be here today if it was not for NSF. So I think you can find lots of people like me if you look across research enterprises in corporations and universities who basically were given opportunities to keep working and encouraged to keep working by NSF funding.
Chairman SMITH. Yeah. Good point.
Dr. MOTE. So I think this is very wide spread. It is not just the faculty members currently, but it is their students, their graduates. I have 56 Ph.D. students. All of those are funded by NSF. They are out there. So if you look at the manpower impact of NSF with relatively small sums of money that is going to be huge—huge I would say. The second way to go about it, if you want to look in terms of research productivity, in terms of things, you can trace technological advances today that can be traced back to NSF-sponsored discoveries. And I think almost everything interesting that is really hot today, information technology and so forth, you can trace its roots back to NSF funding.
Chairman SMITH. Dr. Miaoulis.
Dr. MIAOULIS. I have mostly been supported by NSF since I started my academic career. And if it weren't for NSF, I probably wouldn't be testifying right now in front of you. I think it would be shortsighted to look for immediate results from NSF basic research. Discovery takes years to evolve. And I also agree that most of the major breakthroughs in the health science technologies and the technologies that would make this Nation more safe started by basic research of the National Science Foundation. We have a severe shortage of engineers. We import engineers from abroad. And a lot of our new technology that we may rely on for security reasons are developed abroad. And I don't think that is a safe fact. So by funding NSF will support more educational programs will increase the number of engineers coming out of U.S. institutions.
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Chairman SMITH. Dr. Friedman, let me ask it in a little different way to you. Give me your estimate of what percentage of our stipend and grant programs through NSF could be justified by encouraging more students to stay in that science, math, engineering career into graduate school or in undergraduate to excite them?
Dr. FRIEDMAN. Well, in a certain sense I think the entire funding in NSF does this, because in a certain sense students get involved in research. So even though you build the big facilities, they get involved in it. They get excited by the questions in science. One of the major ways of getting young people in science is to address big questions and provide answers, you know, what is happening in the cosmos, astrophysics, other issues in biology and various other areas. So in a certain sense I would say that almost every penny that is put into NSF funding in some way is attracting people to science because science is a growing thing. It is an organic thing. Not only are you training the students in the research but——
Chairman SMITH. No. No. But still, you can't say that you can't disregard the consequences of that research. So I was trying to balance the consequence of that basic research versus the justification that individuals like you proceed——
Dr. FRIEDMAN. In consequences, but in terms of, you know—economists argue over whether the returns in research are 20 or 40 percent, but all of them agree that it is a big return. And so in a certain sense, if you really think about what has happened to our economy in the last 10-20 years, it is all based upon new knowledge. It is a knowledge-based economy. It comes from basically what we have learned. And the NSF has provided much of the funding to learn this. So if I try to make that estimate, I have to get into the area in which the economists quarrel. But it is immense. It is immense. I mean—let me just say for an example to give you—but it is always long-range. I guess I am talking too long. I am sorry.
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Chairman SMITH. We have one vote now. Representative Etheridge.
Mr. ETHERIDGE. If I can get this mike to stay still—we need to get that fixed. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me agree with what you have said. Basic research. It is long-term. I think we agree on that. And R&D is so critical. But let me go to something even more fundamental than that and that is something I mentioned earlier, is we go back to the K–12. As mentioned earlier in the testimony, because I think it is so critical of where we are, if we are going to get more scientists and engineers, we can't wait until they show up at the college steps because we will never be able to fill that void unless we start early. That being said, with as much emphasis as we are now placing in this country on the quality and the quantity of teaching and learning and the need to improve science-mathematic education for the instruction of those who are going into the workforce, even if they are not engineers, and as we prioritized our budget, how do you think the education directorate should be compensated in the comparison to R&D directorates? Over the years NSF has done, I think, a pretty good job in providing resources and providing instructional material at the levels we need them. However, do you think the amount of funding allocated for education and training is sufficient to do the kind of things we are trying or proposing to do in education?
Dr. MOTE. Just speaking for myself, I am afraid I don't know the funding breakout well enough. But just a very brief comment, I think we need to look at the continuum, as you suggest, from grammar school to post-docs and faculty in terms of science and technology education. And I think the work being done at Tufts is excellent. This is definitely a leading program. And we are at Maryland doing similar things in going to—entering colleges, going into—developing programs with high schools and also with math and science education lower down grades.
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Mr. ETHERIDGE. Thank you.
Dr. MIAOULIS. In many states, K–12 education is funded at the local level. And these are basically the only taxes that the citizens have full control of so you get the parents advocating one thing, the non-parent advocating another. Federal funding through NSF is the big hope of major, major sustenanic changes, changes that could affect fundamentally the way children learn, drawing into sciences and engineering members of underrepresented groups that do not have, in some cases, the mentor at home that is an engineer or is the scientist to push the kids to go into this direction.
Mr. ETHERIDGE. Dr. Friedman.
Dr. FRIEDMAN. Well, I think that when Congress limited the Eisenhower Program to Department of Education for Science that program was about 450 million dollars and NSF has less than that. So I think there certainly has to be more funding in this area. And I do have to agree that the Federal Government has a way of actually improving state-controlled education enormously because of—you know, there are limitations in what—how much taxes one can levy for educational purposes or—and I think the Federal Government has to step in and help. It is to the Federal Government's advantage to do this because clearly these people—an educated workforce is important for the entire Nation, not just your local community.
Mr. ETHERIDGE. I couldn't agree more. And actually young children are great scientists to start with. We just have to let those seeds grow. And I couldn't agree more. And I think the Eisenhower being cut is terrible. It makes a difference. President Mote, let me ask you a question. I happen to come from the second district of North Carolina and we have been unduly hit in recent years by very destructive weather from hurricanes to flash floods to tornadoes. And unfortunately, we had substantial loss of life with flooding, which I think was very unfortunate. We didn't have the kind of warning we should have had. And we have a Bill now to do something about that. And your University was tragically hit by severe weather just over a year ago and with loss of life. And my question to you is, having been directly involved—wish I had somebody from North Carolina here that could ask the same question but I don't have them—can you tell me what kind of adequate warning we have when we have large concentration of students? And since you had a hit last year and lost lives, has Maryland taken steps in that regard and are there things that we need to do to help across this country to make sure that as severe as this weather is we can get the warning out so that loss of lives does not happen in high concentrations where students area?
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Dr. MOTE. Well, Mr. Etheridge—Representative Etheridge, you are very correct in saying that being hit by a tornado was really not on our list of things to worry about. That has turned out to be much more of a problem recently than anybody had anticipated. And in a way, we had two deaths and we were lucky actually that there were only two deaths because of the amount of damage there was—occurred. Since that time we have gone forward with a tornado warning system, a siren system that is fairly typical in the Midwest. And we are going—setting about an educational program to try to let people know what it means. And it is a little bit difficult because we now are having multiple warning issues where we are worrying about terrorists—possible terrorist attacks and tornadoes and other things that happen. So I think it is a complicated problem, actually, that we are working on quite hard and I think it doesn't have an easy solution.
Chairman SMITH. Representative Biggert.
Ms. BIGGERT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a couple questions. First of all, I am from Illinois and in my district is Argonne National Laboratories. And they do a lot in conjunction with the University of Chicago also. But I have concerns when we—I fully support increasing the funding for NSF. I think it is extremely important. My only concern is that sometimes money and increase it one place you take it away from another place like the Department of Energy. And I know that there are collaborations. Do you know of any efforts—are you doing anything to be in—to work in collaboration with any of the labs or do you think this is important of the physician sciences to bring that in too?
Dr. MOTE. Speaking about Maryland just very briefly. Maryland is very blessed in the sense that it is surrounded by very important national laboratories. 11.4 percent of the Federal research expenditure is spent in the State of Maryland of a population of two percent of the country. So the University of Maryland is surrounded by these tremendous opportunities. We spend almost all of our time connecting to the National Security Agency, National Institutes of Health, NASA Guard Space Flight Center, Federal Drug Administration and so on—the USDA. And so these partnerships essentially expand our assets and expand their assets and they are very much to our benefit.
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Dr. FRIEDMAN. The Office of Science in the Department of Energy supports over 50 percent of the physical sciences in this country and plays an extremely important role in—along with the NSF in this area. And so I think it is very important to maintain funding in that office. And of course, it not only is doing that but it is also doing work in biology and in fact played a big role in the genomic sequence—human genomic sequencing project. So you know, I think the point is one has to improve funding of science across agencies because basically all these projects are interrelated and it is very important, again, that we don't let anything fall too far below an operationally successful level.
Dr. MIAOULIS. And to further add, there are collaborative efforts between some of our projects in the labs and some of them started through NSF funding. A faculty member got NSF funding and then the idea grew and then spilled over to the lab.
Ms. BIGGERT. Thank you. And Dr. Miaoulis, I am really happy with what you had to talk about in education and I think it is very important to so many of us on the Education Committee and the Science Committee. I serve on both of them. And really to attract new students to the science and engineering, and in fact I go to a lot of schools, as I know other members do. And actually through kindergarten to grade 12 and even to the university students I think it is so important to encourage them to enter into this field. And it seems like so many of the young girls by the time they get to eighth grade really say, oh, I can't do math; I can't do science, and so they turn away from that. And I think it is part of our role is really to, you know, encourage them and be there, you know, as role models even though I am only a science-geek wannabe. But to just to tell them, you know, that they have the choices to do this and can do it. So hopefully we will have more students. But any ideas that you have on how we can help to do that. I know we have encouraged through legislation to increase the quality of teachers and to increase getting students involved. Anything else that you would suggest?
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Dr. MIAOULIS. The Massachusetts—the mathematic, science, and hopefully engineering partnerships that you are endorsing in increase of budget offer a very nice way to get higher education intimately involved in K–12 education. And I would actually encourage that they report to the National Science Foundation to make specific accommodations to address gender issues in these partnerships.
Ms. BIGGERT. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman SMITH. Representative Honda.
Mr. HONDA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I just want to thank you also for your leadership on this effort to increase the funding. It is wonderful to be working with you. To the witnesses, I represent Silicon Valley where the continuation of the dramatic semi-conductor improvement and chip performance is at risk. Several unsettling trends have emerged that, if left unaddressed, will threaten continued progress and possibly undermine future technology-based economic growth. In many of the critical physical sciences where physical understanding is important for the advancement of industrial technology, there have been marked declines in Federal research support. Enrollment numbers for students majoring in these fields have also declined, meaning there will be an inadequate supply of individuals with the advanced scientific and technological educations to meet the needs of the semi-conductor industry. And I believe all of you have touched upon that. One of the larger increases in the President's proposed NSF budget for fiscal year '03 is for nanotechnology, with over an 11 percent increase in proposed—11 percent increase proposed. However, looking at some of the offices within NSF that are critical for nanotechnology, such as chemistry, material sciences and physics, we have seen declines. My question is, if NSF receives an overall increase in funding, how should it be used? And what I mean by that is this: should we simply keep the existing allocations of support for grant size and duration, for multidisciplinary initiatives, for research instrumentation if a major research facility is rating the same but increase it proportionately? Should we focus funding increases on the physical sciences, math and engineering, perhaps tripling funding in these areas, noting that these fields are often the most promise for making discoveries that will deliver benefit for high-tech industries or should we focus funding increases toward initiatives such as nanotechnology, allowing the funding levels for other programs to remain at prior levels?
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Dr. FRIEDMAN. Well, I—may I answer your question? In my testimony I really made the point that the core disciplines are very, very important to all these high-priority initiatives, because the point is you have to create the foundation. You have got to give good education and good research in material science, in physics, in all these areas in order to make these inter-disciplinary efforts successful. And if you think about the sequencing of the human genome project, it required expertise in computer science, in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics and biology. And without this expertise, it could not have been done. And you can only develop this expertise in developing these core subjects and assume you are trained in these core subjects. And without such training, I do not think the inter-disciplinary work will ultimately be as successful as it should be.
Dr. MOTE. And if I could comment on that. I think this is an excellent topic for the National Science Board to address and to counsel on because while everyone—all of us will support core disciplines—you know go to the bricks for core disciplines, there are also need sometimes to jump-start fields. Computer science needed to be jump-started—well, for example, turned out to be pretty important. And so there is going to be areas where one has to just distinguish between whether this is inter-disciplinary work or whether this is a new discipline. I have often heard people say it depends on your age. Young people say it is a new discipline. Old people say it is inter-disciplinary. So I think it is—there is—the core disciplines need to be supported but there may be—needs the opportunity for some targeting. And I think the National Science Board would be a good vehicle to get that guidance.
Chairman SMITH. Thank you. Representative Gutknecht.
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Mr. GUTKNECHT. I have no questions.
Chairman SMITH. Let us see. Mr. Baca. Excuse me.
Mr. BACA. Well, I think I may have a question. First of all, I do support the increase of funding for NSF programs. And I guess my question would be in reference to the increase of funding, I would ask the question in terms of recruitment in students. Are we currently lacking in terms of the amount of students? When I looked at the amount of institutions and others that are involved in our K–12 currently, are we full to capacity in terms of the areas that we need in science, engineering or do we need to increase or are we lacking? If we are looking at increasing funding, do we have the students that are in those fields?
Dr. MIAOULIS. Well, I am sure you are aware that we have been importing scientists and engineers from other countries and technologies from other countries due to the lack of engineers that are educated here—American engineers. Although the demand for engineers has increased dramatically, nationally we have seen over the last 8 years a 15 percent decrease in the number of engineering students. Increased funding would support programs that would make science and engineering more appealing and it would attract students. Actually, the average grade point average of a student that drops out of engineering, a female student, is a B plus. So it is a matter of how they perceive engineering, not whether they could do engineering or not. And programs, such as the ones I have described before, make engineering appealing and keeps students in engineering schools and also attract them into engineering at the K–12 level.
Mr. BACA. Right. Then are we developing outreach programs with each of the institutions that are involved, and what kind of a master plans are developed in recruiting students, both the K–12 and also at the state college and universities, that are important to enhance this area, so this way we are not going outside and importing engineers and others? So what kind of programs do we have if we are looking and all of us are supporting the increase in funding, but do we really have the outreach programs that are in place, and how are we working with them, and what kind of a master plans are developed for those institutions to make it appealing for students to get into science, math and engineering?
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Dr. MIAOULIS. The partnerships model works well because the universities or school districts cannot get funding unless there is a marriage between school district and higher education. So you have the whole program now in place from kindergarten at the school district all the way to the Ph.D. level in working together into having students getting excited about modern science and engineering, getting them to learn better science and engineering and hopefully if the universities do a good job in presenting it as an attractive path or educational path these students will be pulled from high school all the way into the university.
Mr. BACA. Right. But I am saying are you working with them in developing that master plan to do the recruitment or are we just leaving it up to them as we look at funding in terms of what needs to be done? So I think there has to be a partnership that needs to be developed as well, if we are looking at attracting more. And I also want to add the one thing is that I want to look at when we look at recruitment is that we have diversity, too, as well, in that process so we look at what America really looks like. And I would like to see us in the area of science, math and engineering that it is reflective of what our country looks like.
Dr. FRIEDMAN. Well, the...
Mr. BACA. Not like me.
Dr. FRIEDMAN. The science societies in many of the disciplines are now carrying out programs in terms of public outreach interests in the public in science. They are interacting with school systems to help develop inquiry based education in science at the early ages where I think one can hook students to get an interest in science. And of course, there are many other efforts going on to try to develop more interest in science. We, for example, in physics, we only have 50 percent of the students enrolled in physics that we had in 1960. If you look at the graduate schools, a good fraction of our students are foreign. And many of them return home because they have scientific opportunities at home. So we have to go—make great efforts to develop what I call homegrown science students because they are the ones we can be assured will stay here and contribute to our society. Many of the foreign students do stay here so I don't want to say they all go back. But we do have to work on that. And efforts are being made. And of course, another issue that one should look at is the fact that to the extent that the government really supports science and engineering well, it gives an endorsement to the importance of it. If the word gets out that this is only something that the—that is only grudgingly supported from all—from the Federal Government, people say, well, it is not that important; I will go into something else. And in fact, we have lost students who have gone into other areas, who got trained as Ph.D.s, for example, in physics, went into other areas, actually left physics because the support was so low they felt they had no future in it. So it is a very complicated situation and many things have to be brought to bear to increase the enrollment of students in science in this country.
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Dr. MIAOULIS. If I may add something that addresses the underrepresented groups issue, one of the main reasons we are pushing engineering in the K–12 is because, as I mentioned before, the typical engineer has had a mentor that was an engineer. My dad was an engineer, for example. And members of underrepresented groups, because of traditional purposes, they typically don't have mentors that were engineers so they do not even know what engineering is. If you have engineering as part of the K–12 curriculum, every child understands what it is. And if it is taught in an attractive way, children will want to pursue. So you will see the demographics of engineering changing over the years as it becomes a main discipline in the K–12 school systems.
Mr. BACA. Right. That is why I said it is important that a master plan be developed at that level, whether it is the K–12 or at the state colleges and universities. And if it is incorporated and a partnership is developed and then if there is outreach that is done, we can begin to recruit the students. And then if there is contractual agreement between the parents and the students and the institutions, then we can actually get them into these fields because they know it is going to be rewarding too, as well.
Chairman SMITH. I would like to announce for the consent of the Committee the Chair's intention to start the markup at 11. So if the staff might call the other Members of the Committee, we would start the markup in about 10 minutes. Mike, I would like you to react to some of the concerns that have been expressed to me by students that have dropped out—that started in math and science and then dropped out. Part of it was a feeling that there was an effort on part of some of the professors to do a weeding-out process that first year so that only the individuals and students that were really determined to go into math and science in college and the university setting would continue on so get rid of the light stuff that first year. The other concerns that the really good professors were doing the research and the writing rather than spending some of the time in the classroom. Would all three of you briefly react to that?
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Dr. MOTE. Well, I think to some extent engineering and science curriculum has always been tough. I don't think there has ever been a student that went through that said it wasn't tough. It is also very satisfying. So I think this sense was there when I was a student, was there before I was a student, and it is probably there today. But I don't think it is actually true. I am not sitting on the other side of the table. I don't think there is a conscious effort to weed people out but I think there is a conscious effort to have a strong curriculum. And the best research faculty members are actually the best instructors in general. In other words, the—I have heard research—the relationship between research and teaching is like sin and confession, you know. If you don't do any of the former, you have nothing to talk about in the latter. And so therefore, the really interesting and exciting and current faculty members are those who are at the front-edge of their subject, whatever it happens to be, philosophy or——
Chairman SMITH. So that is a problem or in your mind it is not a problem that——
Dr. MOTE. I would say——
Chairman SMITH [continuing]. The good researchers are not—are spending enough time in the classroom?
Dr. MOTE. What does it mean by spending enough time in the classroom? I would say that the excellent researchers are spending time in teaching, communicating students, educating people, classroom, laboratories, seminars in various ways. I would say it is very important.
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Chairman SMITH. Dr. Miaoulis.
Dr. MIAOULIS. Yes. The problem is that most of these folks do not see the engineering students until the third year. Most engineering schools do not start the real engineering curriculum until junior year. And what we did at Tufts to change the whole enrollment issue and the retention issue is we brought the best teachers to teach in the freshman year. And to motivate them to do that we told them make up a freshman level course that stems out of your own research passions and hobbies. So we have these courses now that they teach with passion. We have outstanding people teaching first-year students and then they convey this passion to the students. And that is what has caused more liberal art students to move into the school engineering than engineering students to move out of engineering.
Chairman SMITH. Dr. Friedman.
Dr. FRIEDMAN. In my experience we do not weed out students. We try to understand what students really want to do, what they love. And if they love a subject and they sometimes falter a little bit, we try to help them to—and very often we can salvage students who have had some rocky beginnings in courses. But the idea, for example...
Chairman SMITH. Are you saying in a lot of the schools there is sort of a mentoring programs for those students that miss a couple...
Dr. FRIEDMAN. I can only speak about my own university because that is MIT. And we try very hard to mentor students who are having difficulty. We have undergraduate research opportunities where the students meet professors very early and we establish a personal relationship. And very often that will help bring the student out. We also make sure that, for example, in the physics department that all freshman physics is primarily taught by professors. And the top-notch researchers teach as much as anybody else in these courses. And it is very important. And in fact, they find it very interesting because very often they will attract some very good undergraduate students to join research groups. And these undergraduates do wonderful work in the research groups. So it is not quite——
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Chairman SMITH. And it is a difference between universities. MIT you do a lot of weeding out on the students that get there in the first place.
Dr. FRIEDMAN. That is right. It is a very selective process in getting in. And we take the point that everybody who gets in can do anything they want. And there is—there should be nothing to impede them.
Chairman SMITH. Mr. Etheridge had a comment-question.
Mr. ETHERIDGE. That is probably true. But let me thank you for your testimony and your comments. And certainly my emphasis, as important as it is, in basic research at the university level, you got to get them. And I will leave it at that. But let me ask one quick question in closing because the Major Research Instrumentation Program of NSF, which really supports the scientific equipment that is being purchased—you touched on it earlier—has been pretty flat for a long time. It got bumped up from 50 some million, I think, to about 76 million in funding in 2002 and all of the sudden requests now is back down to 54 million. My question is to you, just for a brief comment—I think I have already heard you talk on it but I just wanted to get it on the record—that that number is lower than it needs to be if we are going to do the job we need to do because that is one of the hardest areas to get and that is just equipment for the students.
Dr. FRIEDMAN. No. I think that is absolutely correct. It should be increased. I applaud the 50 percent increase that is in the Bill because equipment—scientists can't do anything without equipment. And as science gets more—get deeper into more types of issues, the equipment gets more complicated and more expensive. And if we really want to stay on the cutting edge of these fields, we have to support the kind of equipment that it takes to do these fields.
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Dr. MIAOULIS. And these are funds that have to come from the Federal Government. We cannot charge undergraduates tuition to buy very expensive pieces of equipment. Otherwise, the cost of education would go through the roof.
Dr. MOTE. Specialized equipment give us our unfair advantage in research. If we are going to stay at the edge we need to have the specialized equipment to make these big advances. Otherwise, we will not be there. We will be out of it.
Mr. ETHERIDGE. Thank you.
Chairman SMITH. Mr. Gutknecht, you had a question I understand.
Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Chairman, I just want—I think the only member that is here that is also a member of the Budget Committee. I mean I strongly support increasing the amount of money we spend on research. A few weeks ago Vern Halers and I went out to the labs in Colorado. And I was incredibly impressed with what they are doing out there. And I haven't had a chance to visit your labs. But I just want to say as a member of the Budget Committee we are confronting—just so everyone understands—some pretty difficult challenges right now. As a result of what happened September 11 and some unexpected economic news, we are confronting almost a 100 billion dollar adjustments in our budget figures over a 2-year fiscal—two fiscal years. As a result, we are probably not going to be able to do as much as I think we need to do in terms of scientific research. And I hope you understand that that doesn't mean we don't think what you do is important. It only means that we reflect the will of the people and what the people want is they want national security. They want domestic security. They want free prescription drugs. And they want lower taxes. And so in that environment we have to make some tough choices. That is not your problem. That is our problem. And that is what we do on the Budget Committee. So I just say to you we are going to do the best we can as we go through the appropriation process to make certain that we continue to be the leader because when you compare what the United States spends on basic research versus the rest of the world, I think we can all still be awfully proud because the latest numbers I have is something like 44 percent of all of the basic research money in the world is done by the American people. So for whatever shortcomings we may come up with year, it doesn't mean that we don't appreciate what you do and all the researchers do. We certainly do. We just have—we got a few other problems we have to deal with here in the next couple years.
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Chairman SMITH. I would like to ask the witnesses to maybe take about a minute a piece to express any other ideas or concerns that you think Congress should be looking at as we proceed on this and other research legislation. Mr. Mote.
Dr. MOTE. I would say my concern is the workforce issue is much greater than is generally perceived. And I tell you that because if one looks at over the last few decades what has happened with workforce, basically we have had a decreasing interest among American citizens in going into science and engineering. That decreasing—steadily decreasing interest, at least for a couple decades now, has been supported by international students. We have been very, very attractive for the best in the world to come here and study in our graduate schools and join our economy and join our universities and so forth. That interest among international people to come here and participate is going to be steadily decreasing because there are more opportunities internationally. There are research internationally, universities and other places for people to work at home, and of course, that was the idea to begin with when they came here so it is not surprising that it is happening. At the same time, we have concern about international people coming for security issues. So I think if we look—if we project to the future, we are in a very precarious situation in terms of our long-term workforce for science and engineering.
Chairman SMITH. Dr. Miaoulis.
Dr. MIAOULIS. It is very important to build a strong continuum from kindergarten all the way to the PHD level not only to create more scientist and engineers, but to create basic technological literacy among our populations so they can make well educated decisions. Also, it is important to support engineering to be introduced early into the curriculum so that kids would understand what it is and hopefully choose it as a career. Most advances in the health sciences and in security areas started in the physical sciences. Most instrumental systems like the CAT scan and the MRI machines are products in engineers and physicists that now help scientists and physicians use. So it is important to fund all sorts of research but perhaps balance the funding between health science research and physical and engineering research.
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Chairman SMITH. Are you suggesting that we could back off a little bit on NIH? Are you that bold to——
Dr. MIAOULIS. My preference would be to fund both areas as much as you can.
Chairman SMITH. Dr. Friedman.
Dr. FRIEDMAN. I would like to quote two prominent people. One is Alan Bromley. You probably know Dr. Alan Bromley. We probably all know as a previous science advisor to the first Bush administration. He made the statement, ''No science, no surplus.'' And the point there is that science, scientific research, is really necessary to stimulate our economy. The other person I would like to quote is Dr. Harold Varmus who was former NIH director. And he said that strong biomedical research needs strong programs in physics, chemistry, computer science, engineering and mathematics.
Chairman SMITH. Thank you all very much. Expert witnesses, expert testimony, I think that most of us on the Committee would consider you part of that group of American heroes that are trying to make sure that this country stays ahead of the curve in terms of our economy and our math and science. So my compliments to each one of you. And with that this—the record will stay open on this testimony for five working days. And any member that would like to add additional comments or if the staff would like to convey to you some questions that we didn't ask, maybe you would consider responding in writing. With that the Committee stands in recess. And within the next three or four minutes we will proceed with the markup on the bill.
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[Whereupon, at 11 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
Appendix 1:
Additional Material for the Record
Comments on Reauthorization for the
National Science Foundation
BY DR. DONALD E. THOMPSON
VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH AND DEAN,
THE GRADUATE COLLEGE, WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN
Presented at a Listening Session Conducted by Members of House Science Subcommittee on Research, The Honorable Nick Smith, Michigan, Chairman; Monday, May 6, 2002, Michigan National Tower Building, 124 W. Allegan Street, Lansing, Michigan.
Good morning to you, Chairman Smith and Members of the Subcommittee on Research. Let me first thank the Subcommittee for conducting a listening session in Michigan on the important topic of NSF reauthorization. It is an honor to appear before you on behalf of Western Michigan University's academic community and to share comments on the National Science Foundation. My remarks will address three areas: programs of note, funding levels, and accelerating the application of federally funded basic research.
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Western Michigan University
In 2003 Western Michigan University will celebrate its centennial, marking a century of transformation from a small regional teaching college into one of the 45 largest universities in the country, now enrolling 30,000 students, nearly 6,000 of whom are graduate students. WMU educates the state's second largest number of Michigan resident undergraduates, and is the fourth largest producer of teaching personnel in the nation. WMU is the second fastest growing university in the State of Michigan (based on the Fiscal Year Equated Student count for the past two years), and the 7th fastest growing Carnegie research-extensive university in the United States. WMU has a significant national and international reputation, and our Graduate College offers nearly 100 graduate degree and certificate programs. With its ubiquitous computing environment, the University is also the Nation's first (and largest) public ''wireless'' institution.
Western Michigan University is a nationally recognized student-centered research university whose academic programs and research agenda emphasize applied research. That sense of the practical resonates throughout faculty and student research, as well as regional economic development initiatives. As a result, the institution's research priorities build on its historical strengths in education, the mathematical sciences, bioenvironmental chemistry, and program evaluation to develop research programs in nanoscale science and engineering.
Overview of NSF Funding at WMU
During the past three fiscal years (1999, 2000, and 2001), the National Science Foundation granted 45 Western Michigan University projects a total of $14.7 million.
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That amount, categorized by function, breaks down as follows:
Research, 88.57%
Instruction, 1.04%
Public service, 6.74%
Academic support, 0.74%, and
Scholarships and fellowships, 2.91%.
For these three fiscal years, NSF funding represents 41% of the University's federally sponsored funding and 8% of its total sponsored funding.
Programs of Note
A matter of paramount importance is increasing the number of scientists and engineers who will lead us into the frontiers that nanoscale science and engineering are establishing today—who will conduct the basic and applied science, champion commercialization, and prepare pre-K–16 educators and their students as scientifically literate citizens.
Achieving a diverse and well-prepared workforce of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and their educators will require broadened participation of individuals, pre-K–16 partnerships, and the continued integration of research and education, research and practice.
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Within this context, Western Michigan University views several programs in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources as especially valuable.
1. The Math and Science Partnership program (NSF–02–061) joins mathematics and science research and education to ensure that pre-K–12 students realize their potential. It links networks of researchers and practitioners, requires system-level interactions, and addresses what is, in my view, the most critical issue that American education faces in terms of attracting students to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.
2. The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program (LSAMP) (NSF–01–140) and Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program (AGEP) (NSF–01–138) aim to increase the number of baccalaureate and doctoral degrees awarded, respectively, by targeting talented students in under-represented populations.
3. The Directorate for Education and Human Resources' Evaluation program continues to gain in importance as the demand for greater accountability within education grows. At the same time, there is a relatively small community of STEM evaluators. To meet that need, the Evaluative Research and Evaluation Capacity Building program (NSF–02–34) advances evaluation practice by building a state-of-the-art knowledge base and enhancing capability and infrastructure in STEM education.
Funding Levels
Western Michigan University supports the doubling of the NSF budget, and, in view of the importance that I have ascribed to increasing the number of scientists and engineers and those who educate them, I would note that, among the directorates, Education and Human Resources is central to the development of American scientific leadership. Let me cite three key considerations:
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1. Development of new programs to increase the number of baccalaureates awarded in STEM disciplines. The recently published program solicitation for NSF's Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion program (STEP) (NSF–02–075) is welcome not only because of its goal (to increase the number of baccalaureates) but also because of its breadth, scope, and fit with existing programs, complementing, for example, the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program.
2. Expansion of programs to increase the number of doctorates awarded in STEM disciplines. The Research Experiences for Undergraduates Supplements and Sites (REU) (NSF–01–121) program provides universities a vehicle for engaging young scientists and engineers in research, and AGEP moves them through the doctorate and into the professoriate.
3. Increases in graduate stipends in the Graduate Research Fellowships (NSF–01–146), Graduate Teaching Fellows in K–12 Education (NSF–02–042), and Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) (NSF–00–78) programs are important not only in attracting young scientists and engineers but also leveraging stipend increases at universities, thus improving compensation broadly.
Accelerating the Application of Federally Funded Basic Research
The traditional University model for the commercialization of intellectual property (IP) relies upon faculty research for its creation; time from discovery to application is dictated by University research agendas and priorities. Another model, and one that I would suggest the members of the subcommittee consider, is driven not by discovery and application but by importation and commercialization.
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From a rich history of pharmaceutical and medical device development in southwest Michigan dating back to the founding of The Upjohn Company more than a century ago have come companies specializing in analytical services to the pharmaceutical industry, companies specializing in custom synthesis of specialty organic intermediates, and independent entrepreneurs providing pharmaceutical services for clinical development. Drawing upon that history and driven by the partnership of the private-sector engine Southwest Michigan First and Western Michigan University, regional economic development has adopted as its strategic focus the identification and importation of technologies and/or companies that can be developed into pharmaceutical products and services.
Already we have been successful. The past 18 months have seen imported technology from a half dozen existing startup companies, entrepreneurs, and major pharmaceutical companies. To name three:
1. NephRx, Inc. emerged from technology discovered at the University of Chicago, and research has commenced at WMU to develop novel therapies for the treatment of gastric ulcers.
2. SenseGene, Inc. was founded in Kalamazoo in Fall 2001. Based on intellectual property developed at Wayne State University, the science centers around novel mechanisms for regulating gene expression in cancer.
3. NanoMed, Inc. was founded based upon novel drug delivery technology developed at the University of Kentucky and is committed to relocate their developmental efforts to the wet-lab facility at WMU.
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The National Science Foundation, by encouraging importation models such as this one, could then position universities to accelerate the application of federally funded basic research and foster economic development in areas such as the life sciences, advanced technology, and information technology.
Western Michigan University is positioned to bring to the state of Michigan a share of an increased NSF budget, graduate more scientists and engineers, foster application of federally funded basic research, and strengthen economic development regionally.
At this time, I will conclude my remarks by reiterating the underlying theme here, that being, without an investment in human capital there will be no conversation about American preeminence in science, about a robust economy, or about a society that looks to higher education for answers to some of the most important scientific questions of the day.
Thank you.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MARVIN G. PARNES
Marvin G. Parnes, Associate Vice President for Research & Executive Director of Research Administration, University of Michigan
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee.
Good morning. My name is Marvin G. Parnes, Associate Vice President for Research and Executive Director of Research Administration at the University of Michigan. My duties include oversight of our offices of sponsored research and technology transfer, as well as management of resources for new research program development. I appreciate this opportunity to respond to your questions and share some observations about NSF from a University of Michigan perspective. My comments build on previous testimony to the Subcommittee on Research by Stephen Director, Dean of the College of Engineering (March 13, 2002), Fawwaz Ulaby, Vice President for Research (September 28, 1999), and Timothy Killeen, the former Associate Vice President for Research (February 28, 2000).
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Mr. Chairman, we wish to begin by recognizing your outstanding leadership in support of basic science and in advancing the critical role NSF plays in the life of the University. Michigan has benefited by your willingness to learn about its programs through visits to our campus and as a host to our faculty when they visit Washington.
Our brief comments are organized to be responsive to your questions.
1. Provide an overview of research activities at the University of Michigan.
Michigan is a comprehensive research university with strengths in many disciplines and boasts a host of interdisciplinary programs. As you know, the University of Michigan has a large research program. In FY 2001, our total research expenditures were $592M. Of that, approximately $50 million, or about 12.5%, of the federal support for research at the University came from the NSF. This provided direct support for 791 active projects, 570 faculty researchers, 102 postdoctoral fellows, 429 graduate students, and 196 undergraduate student researchers.
NSF support is critical to our research programs in engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, geosciences, biological sciences, computer and information sciences, and the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. This broad portfolio of NSF-sponsored research contributes enormously to the intellectual vigor of our institution. The importance of these NSF programs to the University of Michigan's education and research mission simply cannot be overstated.
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2. What NSF programs and initiatives are most valuable to your university?
Individual investigator awards are of paramount importance because they nourish the creativity and innovation that is the cornerstone of all other research efforts.
NSF Initiatives such as Nanotechnology, Biocomplexity, and Nanoscale Sciences have positive impacts in many areas, even when NSF funding is not forthcoming because they stimulate new modes of collaboration and new formulations of problems and solutions. At the UM we use these initiatives to organize workshops, bringing faculty together to form new collaborations, and to establish new links to industry and other universities.
IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training Program) is an excellent program for stimulating creative approaches to graduate research training and provides a means for new programs to crystallize their intellectual direction and establish innovative curricular and organizational structures. Major Research Centers, supported through programs such as the ERC, STC, Frontier of Physics, etc., are very important and significant, galvanizing new relationships that link research and training with societal and industrial applications while maintaining a fundamental research focus.
Support for K–12, undergraduate education and pipeline issues, as well as recent programs such as ADVANCE, support campus-based creativity and program development and highlight the national importance of local efforts in creating a diverse scientific cadre. Major Research Infrastructure awards have proven valuable to Michigan over the years, again by bringing together groups of faculty to focus on high priority activities and raise the aspirations of researchers as a result of new leading edge equipment. Lastly, we find that NSF has been the most user-friendly funding agency. Their online computer system, known as Fastlane, provides excellent support for grant application and management. Fastlane is light years ahead of all the other agencies and provides a model for what all Federal agencies should strive for.
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3. What programs could be improved, and how?
Young investigators need support to maintain their motivation and provide encouragement. NSF Career Awards should be increased in number. Alternatively, additional individual investigator award programs could be developed as special competitions for young investigators with substantial funding but possibly smaller individual awards.
Foundations like Burroughs-Wellcome Fund are funding new/young investigator awards in the biomedical sciences and we need the equivalent in engineering and natural sciences. Program emphasis on K–12 is valuable, but our investigators would like to see more funds for evaluation and integration of program innovations.
The IGERT is an excellent program, but needs more funds beyond student support for development and administration related to the establishment of new programs.
The Great Lakes are a key issue for UM and other Great Lakes universities and UM is working collaboratively on new initiatives to support Great Lakes research and would welcome greater NSF support. We are also delighted to see funding for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) included in the President's FY03 budget request.
4. In your view, how should the Committee prioritize funding among different directorates?
As you might imagine, there is no consensus among our faculty about how the priorities should be set among directorates; all fields are important at a comprehensive research university.
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One general comment from a number of our faculty is that the size of individual investigator awards from many NSF directorates has been eroding over the years. Faculty with many years of experience with the NSF say that they used to be able to support several graduate students on a given grant, whereas today it is hard to fund even one student. Put another way, it takes about two funded projects to support the same amount of research as one project covered a decade ago.
5. Please provide any other thoughts on how NSF can be further strengthened.
We must continue to focus on filling the basic science pipeline at the undergraduate level. Fellowships for undergraduates and special programs like IGERT should be enhanced to draw undergraduates to areas like physics, chemistry and math. Programs that support the research experiences for undergraduates, such as the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program should be expanded. We applaud your Committee's attention to undergraduate education and encourage support for legislation such as the Tech Talent Bill which work to ensure that we have an adequate supply of people trained in key scientific and technical fields. While our universities are greatly enriched by the international students who are among our best and brightest students, we would like to encourage more U.S. citizens to enter science and technology fields.
6. Regarding the way in which basic research is managed at the university level, should Congress explore guidelines requiring that a portion or all revenues gained as a result of federally funded basic research be used specifically for future university research activities?
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By and large, technology transfer and research commercialization derived from basic research barely supports itself. Universities engage in these activities to ensure that our research efforts are used for the public good. Few schools make significant money, and those who do generally have one of two ''big hits.''
The Bayh-Dole Act already requires that all proceeds of technology transfer be reinvested in research and education. We believe that the Bayh-Dole Act is working very well and additional guidelines are not required.
NSF's role in support of basic research is essential and it is important not to expect any revenue return from research in the short term. Without adequate unfettered basic science research to lay the ground work, there will be few discoveries that result in technology with applied potential.
Flexibility and local autonomy in managing research funds is important. Research universities are always investing in their own research. At the UM, $98 million, or 16.6%, of our research is self-supported, and other universities spend comparable amounts in support of research.
7. How does the University of Michigan work to assure that knowledge and capabilities acquired through basic research address public and private needs? How can Congress help to accelerate the application of federally funded basic research?
Addressing public and private needs is central to UM's mission.
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UM Mission Statement
The mission of the University of Michigan is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.
Our students are our best conveyors of research to the public through the application of their leading-edge knowledge and skills in the workplace. NSF contributes directly and indirectly to much of the education of students in areas with NSF research support programs. Our Centers have very explicit programs directed at getting research results into use through industrial affiliates programs, etc. We are proud of the accomplishments of NSF funded programs like the Science and Technology Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences, the Engineering Research Centers for Reconfigurable Machining Systems and Wireless Integrated Microsystems in meeting industry needs and spawning new businesses.
Technology transfer continue to increase its presence on campus. The Bayh-Dole Act is a very effective stimulus for ensuring that universities commercialize their research results and it should continue to receive strong support.
Congress should be a model and use research in their deliberations: e.g., environmental issues, social policy issues, education all benefit from research findings.
While we are deeply concerned with national security issues, we believe that caution must be exercised in placing restrictions on sharing research results. Research findings should not be unduly restricted or controlled as openness and intellectual exchange is the cornerstone of not only a free society, but also of a system of rich scientific development and application.
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(Footnote 1 return)
See Appendix 1: Additional Material for the Record, pp. 54–59.