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What’s Ahead
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| Alondra Nelson speaks at a Sept. 24 event on “innovation for equity” held by Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. (Image credit – The White House) |
AAAS Devoting Policy Forum to Diversity Matters
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual Forum on Science and Technology Policy this week, dedicated this year to the theme of “the essentiality of DEI to innovation.” White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander and OSTP Deputy Director for Science and Society Alondra Nelson will address the forum on Tuesday. They will discuss OSTP’s series of listening sessions called “The Time is Now,” which have so far focused on disability equity, anti-racism, local community engagement, and evaluation methods. On Wednesday, National Science Foundation Chief Operating Officer Karen Marrongelle will speak on efforts to build a “more inclusive science and engineering enterprise.” From Congress, Dahlia Sokolov, the Democratic staff director of the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Technology, will participate in a panel on legislative and executive efforts to “address systemic racism in government and academia.” The National Academies is currently spinning up a study on the topic in response to a request made last year by Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX).
Third Annual Anti-Harassment Summit Convenes
The National Academies’ Action Collaborative on Sexual Harassment in Higher Education is holding its third annual public summit beginning Tuesday. Launched in 2019 following the Academies’ report on the prevalence of sexual harassment against women in academia, the group aims to advance efforts that “move beyond basic legal compliance” and implement evidence-based practices for addressing and preventing harassment. The group recently released guidance for measuring harassment prevalence using campus climate surveys and expanded its searchable repository of interventions, which contains nearly 200 descriptions of specific policies, practices, and programs piloted by participating organizations. Members of the group include over 40 universities and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Retiring Weather Service Director to Testify on Future of Forecasting
The House Science Committee is holding a hearing on Thursday titled, “The Future of Forecasting: Building a Weather-Ready Nation on All Fronts.” Among the witnesses is National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini, who announced last month that he will retire in January after nearly a decade in the role. Uccellini has served in various leadership roles at NOAA since 1989, including 14 years as director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, and as NWS director he oversaw the creation of Impact-Based Decision Support Services, which provide tailored risk information to local officials. The other panelists for the hearing are John Werner, president of the NWS employee union; Erik Salna, associate director for education and outreach at Florida International University’s International Hurricane Research Center; and Cardell Johnson, acting director of the Natural Resources and Environment unit at the Government Accountability Office. In recent years, GAO has issued reports on staffing shortages at NWS, weather satellite data gaps, and anti-harassment initiatives by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of NWS.
New NSF Chief Facilities Officer Begins
Atmospheric scientist Linnea Avallone is taking up the reins this week as the National Science Foundation’s chief officer for research facilities. Avallone has worked at NSF since 2012, most recently as a senior adviser for facilities in the Geosciences Directorate. Prior to joining the agency, she worked for 17 years as a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Avallone is succeeding Jim Ulvestad, who has held the role since its creation in 2017. Separately this week, in lieu of its annual in-person Large Facilities Workshop, NSF is holding a webinar on cyberinfrastructure and cybersecurity at major facilities on Thursday in coordination with the 2021 NSF Cybersecurity Summit.
Lucy Set to Begin 12-Year Tour of Trojan Asteroids
NASA’s Lucy mission is scheduled to launch on Saturday, starting its journey along a 12-year trajectory that will take it past eight asteroids. Led by a team from the Southwest Research Institute, Lucy will be the first mission to visit the Trojan asteroids, which precede and follow Jupiter in its orbit, and it will set a record for most destinations in independent orbits visited by a spacecraft. The Trojan asteroids are believed to be similar to the more distant Kuiper Belt objects and may harbor clues about the early history of the solar system. NASA is holding a series of briefings with Lucy project officials this week in the run up to the launch. Lucy and a second asteroid mission called Psyche were selected in 2017 through NASA’s Discovery program, which awards funding to projects proposed through a competitive process. Psyche, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is scheduled to launch in August 2022 on a four-year journey to a metallic asteroid between Mars and Jupiter that may be the core of a planet that failed to cohere. The two missions each have an estimated lifecycle cost of just under $1 billion.
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In Case You Missed It
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| Francis Collins in 2018, during a visit to NIH by then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams, left. (Image credit – NIH) |
NIH Director Francis Collins Announces Plans to Step Down
Francis Collins announced on Oct. 5 that he will resign as director of the National Institutes of Health by the end of the year and return to his laboratory at NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). President Obama originally picked Collins as director in 2009 and, after being retained by Presidents Trump and Biden, he now ranks among the longest-serving science agency heads of the last half-century. During his tenure, Congress increased NIH’s budget from $30 billion to $43 billion and the agency launched a number of major research initiatives, including the BRAIN Initiative to study how the brain functions, the All Of Us Research Program to gather health data from a million-person cohort, and the Cancer Moonshot that Biden spearheaded when he was vice president. Previously, as NHGRI director from 1993 to 2008, Collins oversaw federally funded work on the Human Genome Project, which led President Bush to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.
Most recently, Collins led NIH’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and developed plans for a new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. In addition, he has overseen efforts to expand the diversity of the researchers NIH funds, crack down on sexual harassment at NIH-funded institutions, and uncover researchers who have not properly disclosed connections to foreign institutions, leading dozens to resign or be fired. According to the Washington Post, Collins considered resigning last year when Trump contravened researchers’ views on COVID-19. In a statement last week, Collins said he is stepping aside now in the belief that “no single person should serve in the position too long.” Calling Collins “one of the most important scientists of our time,” Biden remarked in his own statement, “I will miss the counsel, expertise, and good humor of a brilliant mind and dear friend.”
NSF Details Spike in Foreign Talent Plan Investigations
At a House Science Committee hearing last week, National Science Foundation Inspector General Allison Lerner stated that suspected cases of undue “foreign influence” on NSF grantees now comprise 63% of her office’s investigative portfolio. Lerner said the workload growth began in late 2017 after her office became aware of issues associated with grantees participating in talent recruitment programs sponsored by foreign entities. In her written testimony, Lerner indicated that as of this August NSF had recovered $7.9 million in grant funds after taking action against 23 grantees. According to reporting by the journal Science, all but one of the cases involved researchers with ties to China, and based on the office’s overall caseload, it perhaps has around 80 active investigations related to foreign influence. NSF Chief of Research Security Strategy and Policy Rebecca Spyke Keiser stated this summer that another reason for the increase is that around 2016 the Chinese government began allowing participants in its talent recruitment programs to participate on a part-time rather than full-time basis, remarking, “That was when we also saw many of these programs start to not be disclosed and an uptick in number of people subscribing to the programs.” Lerner testified that her office has become “overwhelmed” by allegations of grantee wrongdoing that it has received from “NSF, from academic institutions, and from other law enforcement entities.” She suggested that a doubling of her office’s current investigative staff of 20 is warranted to handle the caseload.
CIA Elevates Attention to Technology Trends, China
On Oct. 7, the Central Intelligence Agency announced it has formed a Transnational and Technology Mission Center focused on “new and emerging technologies, economic security, climate change, and global health.” In addition, it has created a chief technology officer position and launched a “Technology Fellows program” that will bring outside experts into the CIA for one-to-two-year terms. The moves build on CIA’s creation of a federal laboratory last year and a digital innovation directorate in 2015. Alongside the new technology center, the agency has also created a China Mission Center that will unify its activities related to the country. In a statement, CIA Director William Burns said the center will “strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st Century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.”
White House Highlights Quantum Workforce Needs at Summit
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy held a summit on Oct. 5 on “quantum industry and society” with representatives of more than 20 companies developing quantum technologies. Participants included Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Intel, Honeywell, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, HRL, and Goldman Sachs, as well as a number of smaller companies focused specifically on quantum technology. In conjunction with the event, OSTP released an interagency report that highlights how foreign nationals comprise about half of U.S. university graduates in fields related to quantum information science and technology (QIST). The report states there is currently “significant unmet demand for talent at all levels” of the QIST workforce and notes long lead times are required to expand the domestic workforce in these fields. Accordingly, it calls for efforts to better attract and retain foreign-born talent while simultaneously expanding the domestic workforce. The summit is the latest in a series OSTP has held in recent years on QIST.
Strategic Computing Reserve Concepts Gains Traction
Last week, the interagency National Science and Technology Council released a blueprint for a “national strategic computing reserve” that would be tapped into during emergencies. The concept is motivated in large part by lessons learned from the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, which was stood up to provide pandemic researchers with priority access to federal and non-federal supercomputing resources. Noting that the ad hoc creation of the consortium diverted resources from existing research projects and significantly increased the workloads of the personnel involved, the blueprint outlines structures needed to ensure computing resources and expertise can be rapidly mobilized while minimizing disruptions to the broader research ecosystem. It recommends establishing a program office that would develop partnerships with resource providers and coordinate the allocation of resources to users. The office would also determine specific activation criteria for future crises and coordinate annual training exercises to demonstrate readiness for a variety of potential disasters. The blueprint estimates the office would require an annual budget of $2 million and that the necessary cyberinfrastructure platform for allocating resources would require an additional $2 million per year. It also indicates federal agencies would have to expand their existing computing capacity, suggesting that “20% of additional resource capacity in the steady state is necessary to ensure adequate resources for future emergencies.”
NIST Links Reactor Incident to Staff Turnover
The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a report last week analyzing causes of an incident in February in which the agency’s research reactor released radiation into the surrounding facility. Several workers received elevated radiation doses as a result of the incident, albeit within regulatory limits, and the reactor has been shut down since then, depriving researchers of a facility that supports almost half of U.S.-based neutron-scattering research. According to NIST’s analysis, reactor operators did not fully secure one of the reactor’s 30 fuel elements during a routine refueling operation and then failed to properly perform follow-up checks. NIST traces the errors to the departure of personnel who had long experience with refueling the reactor and to deficiencies in refueling procedures and the training of new operators that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A triennial National Academies review of the reactor facility in 2018 did not identify increased staff turnover as a risk for the reactor facility. The next such review is currently underway. NIST cannot restart the reactor until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission completes its own review of the incident and NIST’s corrective actions.
SLAC Petawatt Laser Facility Upgrade Moves Ahead
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced last week that the proposed upgrade to its Matter in Extreme Conditions instrument has received approval from the Department of Energy to begin preliminary design work, a milestone known as Critical Decision 1. The upgrade involves building a new underground cavern that will couple the X-ray laser beam from SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source-II with a short-pulse petawatt laser as well as a second, lower-energy long-pulse laser, enabling study of new regimes of hot dense plasmas. DOE initiated the project in response to a 2017 National Academies report that spotlighted how the U.S. lags internationally in capabilities for laser research at the highest powers currently achievable. As of this spring, the estimated cost range for the upgrade was $234 million to $372 million with a target of completing the project by 2028. SLAC is pursuing the project in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
Agencies Release Climate Adaptation Plans
The White House announced federal agencies’ release of 23 climate change adaptation plans last week that respond to a Jan. 27 executive order by President Biden. Preparedness actions identified in the plans primarily revolve around protecting federal facilities and activities, with some agencies also outlining research and services aimed at mitigating climate change impacts. For instance, the Department of Energy’s plan states that over the next year all department sites will conduct climate vulnerability assessments, and it outlines departmental efforts to provide climate-adaptation tools and develop climate-resilient technologies. The Commerce Department’s plan outlines activities such as the provision of climate information by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the development of “forward-looking” building standards by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Department of the Interior’s plan focuses on efforts across agencies to examine threats, such as those related to wildfire and water supplies, and to develop climate-sensitive resource management strategies.
Physics Nobel Prize Recognizes Climate Modeling Work
Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi were jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences last week for their work on complex systems. Half of the award was given to Manabe and Hasselmann for “the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming,” marking the first time the physics prize has gone to advances in climate science. Working at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the 1960s, Manabe developed a numerical model of energy in the atmosphere that enabled sound quantitative predictions of future warming. A decade later, at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, Hasselmann created a stochastic climate model that added fluctuations due to weather, paving the way for the attribution of weather events to climate change. The other half of the prize was awarded for Parisi’s mathematical solution to the “spin-glass problem,” which bears on the complex organization of magnetic spins in certain materials but has also found applications in fields such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and biology.
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Events This Week Monday, October 11
No events.
Tuesday, October 12
Wednesday, October 13
Thursday, October 14
Friday, October 15
Monday, October 18
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Opportunities NASA Seeks Input on Planned Diversity Requirements
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate is seeking input as it prepares to add inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) requirements to its Announcements of Opportunity, which the agency uses to solicit proposals for principal investigator-led space missions. The draft change would require proposals to describe “the processes used to assemble the proposed team and how those processes align with NASA’s IDEA values.” Applicants would also be required to describe “the processes that will be employed to enable and monitor (i) the creation and maintenance of an inclusive and equitable environment throughout the project lifecycle, (ii) the maintenance of a diverse team, and (iii) the continued access to equitable opportunities for contributions from team members towards mission success.” Responses are due Nov. 3.
OSTP Seeking Input on Advanced Manufacturing Strategy
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is seeking input on ways federal programs can support U.S. domestic manufacturing competitiveness. Responses will inform the development of a National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing. OSTP is specifically seeking input on “advanced manufacturing research and development that will create jobs, grow the economy across multiple industrial sectors, strengthen national security, enhance sustainability, contribute to climate change challenges, and improve health care.” Comments are due Dec. 17.
Nuclear Threat Reduction Fellowship Accepting Applications
The Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction is accepting applications for its 2022 Next-Generation Fellowship, which aims to “strengthen participation of graduate students, postdocs, and early-career physicists and engineers in advancing nuclear weapons threat reduction.” The one-year fellowship provides travel and professional development support, including two trips to Washington, D.C., and participation in a four-day Summer School on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, among other activities. Applications are due Nov. 30.
Know of an upcoming science policy event either inside or outside the Beltway? Email us at fyi@aip.org.
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Around the Web
News and views currently in circulation. Links do not imply endorsement.
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- Emerging industrial policy approaches in the US (ITIF, perspective by Bill Bonvillian)
- Six rules to guide the West’s efforts to counter China’s industrial policy (The Hill, perspective by Stewart Baker)
- The Commerce Department is the neglected agency at the center of Biden’s China strategy (Politico, perspective by Martijn Rasser and Megan Lamberth)
- Why basic science matters for economic growth (IMF, perspective by Philip Barrett, et al.)
- Scaling research solutions for society’s real problems (Issues in Science and Technology, perspective by Gopal Sarma)
- Cosmic affairs at the New York Times (APS Forum on Physics and Society, perspective by Dennis Overbye)
- Reporting science (Physics in Perspective, editorial)
- Google bans ads on content with false claims about climate change (New York Times)
- Francis Collins, departing the NIH, on his belief in truth (Washington Post, perspective by Michael Gerson)
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