NSF director says focus will be on enhancing the success rate

NSF director says focus will be on enhancing the success rate

The new director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently said that the agency will hold constant the size and duration of the grants it funds and concentrate for the next two or three budget cycles on increasing the number of meritorious proposals. In FY 2004, the average grant from NSF was for $140,000 over an average of just less than three years. NSF provides approximately 20% of federal support to academic institutions for basic research.

Arden Bement's formal appointment to a 6-year term as director of NSF was confirmed in November 2004; he has served as acting director since February 2004. He assumes full leadership of an agency fiscally challenged by a FY 2005 appropriation nearly 2% below FY 2004. In the recently signed FY 2005 omnibus funding bill (P. L. 108 - 447) NSF received $5.473 billion, compared with last year's appropriation of $5.578 billion, a decrease of $105 million dollars or more, when inflation is factored into the mix.

Bement said he would meet funding constraints by asking each NSF directorate to make an assessment and "refocus resources on the frontier and beyond" with an emphasis on transformational research. He wants the agency to find an appropriate balance between solicited and unsolicited research and between small groups and research centers. He also said he would focus on continued productivity in cyberinfrastructure, in evaluative tools and measurement -- large projects and small -- and in ways of enabling university partnerships in an era of large, multidisciplinary scientific teams and costly infrastructure.

Bement said he will emphasize broadened participation from underrepresented populations in the agency's push to build STEM education and turn around the numbers in U.S. S&T career tracks so the U.S. will not be dependent on foreign postdocs to man laboratories.

Bement spoke in particular of opportunities for researchers coming up who are looking "at the white spaces between the disciplines." The new generation of researchers is excited about interdisciplinary research, including inquiry at the interface of the life and physical sciences, he said, noting today's interdisciplinary research will become tomorrow's acknowledged disciplines.