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What’s Ahead
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| Arati Prabhakar, left, speaks with AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh on Oct. 21 after her first major speech since being sworn in as President Biden’s chief science adviser. (Image credit – John Harrington / AAAS) |
AAAS Holding Annual Science and Technology Policy Forum
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is hosting its annual Forum on Science and Technology Policy on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh will open the event with an address that reviews results from the organization’s recent survey on public access to research. Parikh recently co-authored an editorial in support of the White House’s new open access policy, while warning that open access models that require authors to pay publication fees can present barriers for early-career scientists and scientists at institutions with fewer resources. AAAS recently announced that, beginning in 2023, its flagship journal Science will allow authors to make an “almost-final version” of their manuscripts immediately available to the public with no fee. Also on the forum’s agenda is a session reflecting on the 50-year history of the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship program, which will feature a panel with three former fellows: AAAS Center for Evidence in Public Policy Director Michael Fernandez, Hewlett Packard AI Chief Strategist Arti Garg, and senior House Science Committee staff member Dahlia Sokolov. The agenda also includes a session on the ethics of artificial intelligence, a lecture on the James Webb Space Telescope, and a free evening lecture by Frances Colón, senior director for international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, titled, “The Need for Civic Science in Peace and Crisis.”
Prabhakar Airs Views on US Research Enterprise
In the past, the president’s science adviser has presented a keynote address at the AAAS forum, but Arati Prabhakar gave her first major speech in that role at a standalone AAAS event late last week. In it, she outlined “three shifts” she believes are needed to better reap the benefits of science and technology. She said the first involves “building a ‘what-does-it-take’ mindset,” in which the research ecosystem mobilizes around bold goals, and cited Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative and the CHIPS and Science Act as positive examples. Second, she said the U.S. must be “much more deliberate about opening the opportunities that science and technology provides to everyone in every zip code,” such as by embracing regional innovation initiatives. Last, she called for more deeply considering the “societal implications” of new technologies, pointing to OSTP’s new “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights” as an exemplar of such work. In response to audience questions, she said she views the U.S. research enterprise as generally healthy but suggested there are “structural gaps” that impede the translation of scientific breakthroughs into commercial technologies. She also noted she is “somewhat concerned” about risk aversion in basic research. “Over and over again, what I hear from people in basic research is a sense that their wings have been clipped,” she said. “People have this yearning to do really bold things, unbounded research, and while that is certainly the intent of the public investment in basic research, something’s not working there.” She said she is not sure yet if there is a role for OSTP in addressing the matter, but remarked, “I want to listen and learn. … I don’t find the explanations that I’m hearing to be very convincing, and it makes me think that we, the community, need to do some work.”
NIST Officials to Discuss Implementation of CHIPS Initiatives
The main advisory panel for the National Institute of Standards and Technology is meeting on Tuesday. Three officials with senior roles in implementing the semiconductor initiatives funded by the CHIPS and Science Act will speak about those efforts, which are led by NIST and involve administering subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing and setting up a National Semiconductor Technology Center and National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program. The center and packaging program together have a startup budget of almost $5 billion, eclipsing NIST’s own annual budget, and are likely to be distributed across multiple sites. In recent weeks, NIST officials have also held a series of webinars covering their plans for the CHIPS initiatives. Other items on this week’s agenda include discussion of a “safety incident,” as well as reports from advisory subcommittees focused on the agency’s visibility, workforce, and manufacturing programs. There is also expected to be a brief update on efforts to restart NIST’s research reactor. The agency now plans to delay an upgrade to the reactor’s cold neutron source so that it can first conduct several cycles of science operations once it secures permission from regulators to begin running again.
NSF Advisory Panels Convening
The advisory committee for the National Science Foundation’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate is meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by the Engineering Directorate advisory committee on Wednesday and Thursday. Each panel will meet with NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, who is apt to comment on the agency’s initial response to the recently enacted CHIPS and Science Act. Other topics on the MPS committee’s agenda include sustainable chemistry, clean energy, quantum information science, “articulating impacts of basic research,” and NSF’s proposed GRANTED program, which would fund research capacity-building projects at emerging and underserved institutions. The Engineering committee will discuss the recently released National Strategy for Advanced Manufacturing, NSF’s new crop of Engineering Research Centers, and options for rapidly expanding the engineering workforce. Also meeting on Thursday is NSF’s Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering, which will discuss recommendations from its recent report, “Envisioning the Future of NSF EPSCoR.”
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In Case You Missed It
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| Secretary of State Tony Blinken visits SLAC National Accelerator Lab. (Image credit – State Department) |
Blinken Pushes Technology Policy for End of ‘Post-Cold War’ Era
Secretary of State Tony Blinken toured the Silicon Valley area last week, speaking at SLAC National Accelerator Lab, Stanford University, the university’s Hoover Institution, and semiconductor company Applied Materials. Elaborating on themes from the Biden administration’s new National Security Strategy, he stressed the role of technology in U.S. foreign policy, which is a subject he has been focused on for well over a year. Now, though, the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act have put expansive resources into building up U.S. industrial capacity in clean-energy and microelectronics technologies. At the same time, the U.S. has become more aggressive in countering China’s influence as a global technology player, particularly by implementing far-reaching controls on trade in advanced semiconductors. Blinken pointed to both developments in asserting the “post-Cold War” era is ending and that the Biden administration is positioning the U.S. for a period of intense competition to shape how technology operates in the world. Bloomberg reported last week that the U.S. is considering escalating its campaign to limit trade with China in advanced technologies by extending its controls to cover artificial intelligence and quantum computing technology. A top Commerce Department official will discuss the semiconductor controls at an event on Thursday.
Biden Administration Launches Battery Materials Initiative
The Department of Energy announced last week it is awarding $2.8 billion to 21 projects focused on expanding domestic battery manufacturing and recycling. Spanning 20 companies in 12 states, the projects are the first to be funded through the roughly $25 billion the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is appropriating to support the development and demonstration of clean-energy technologies. In tandem with the awards, the Biden administration announced an Advanced Battery Materials Initiative, which aims to “mobilize the entire government in securing a reliable and sustainable supply of critical minerals used for power, electricity, and electric vehicles.” Guided by a White House steering committee, the initiative will coordinate critical minerals R&D across agencies and support industry outreach and diplomacy to bolster domestic and international supply chains.
NSF Launches ‘Emerging Technology’ Workforce Development Program
On Oct. 19, the National Science Foundation announced a new grant program called ExLENT (Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies) that will support initiatives to offer individuals paid skill-development and career-building opportunities in emerging technology fields. The program encompasses three tracks that respectively focus on helping established professionals pivot into emerging technology fields, providing career-building opportunities for individuals with limited STEM training, and giving individuals with no STEM training exposure to these fields. Grant awards will be made to partnerships between organizations with expertise in workforce development and entities working in emerging technology, including companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. Each grant can be worth up to $1 million over three years, and the program will have a total initial budget of $30 million. NSF is holding a webinar on the program on Nov. 1.
White House Renews Push on Pandemic Preparedness
President Biden issued a national security memorandum last week outlining his administration’s policy for countering biological threats, enhancing pandemic preparedness, and reinforcing global health security. In a background call with reporters, a senior administration official highlighted priorities in the area, including bolstering safety and security at biological laboratories and strengthening international norms around preventing the use of biological weapons. An official from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy further highlighted four administration goals for pandemic preparedness: enhancing early warning of pathogens, developing and rapidly scaling production of diagnostic tests, developing novel vaccines within 100 days and manufacturing enough to meet U.S. needs within 130 days, and developing novel therapeutics within 180 days. The official also noted the administration is seeking $88 billion over five years to implement pandemic preparedness strategies. Eric Lander, then serving as Biden’s science adviser, pressed Congress a year ago to fund such efforts but lawmakers did not address the proposals in its annual spending legislation or the legislation that ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act.
Science Committee Presses OSTP on Public Access Policy
House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) and Ranking Member Frank Lucas (R-OK) sent a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last week seeking clarification on the office’s watershed memorandum that, starting in 2026, will generally require federally funded research articles and supporting data to be made freely available upon publication. The letter registers concern that the memo is “short on details of how the new requirements will be implemented,” especially with respect to data. “Making data accessible in a way that is truly useful to advance science has always been a more difficult technical, cultural, and economic challenge than making publications available,” it states. In addition, Johnson and Lucas ask OSTP whether it anticipates new appropriations will be necessary to support data repositories, whether it will orchestrate a government-wide definition of scientific data or permit variations across disciplines, and whether it will require data be made accessible in perpetuity. Concerning the memo’s directive to eliminate the 12-month embargo periods allowed under current policy, they ask how OSTP will ensure the publication fees that some journals charge to make articles open access do not sap research funds and how it will help researchers with limited resources pay such fees. They also urge OSTP to address these and other implementation issues in the coming months through a new round of stakeholder meetings as well as public workshops.
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Events This Week
All times are Eastern Daylight Time, unless otherwise noted. Listings do not imply endorsement.
Monday, October 24
Tuesday, October 25
Wednesday, October 26
Thursday, October 27
Friday, October 28
Sunday, October 30
Monday, October 31
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Opportunities OECD Hiring Science, Technology, and Innovation Director
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a coalition of 38 countries, is hiring a director for its Science, Technology and Innovation Directorate. The director will lead policy research and analysis, standards development, and stakeholder outreach in areas such as the digital economy, productivity and entrepreneurship, innovation policy, and structural and industry policy. Candidates should have an advanced degree in economics or a related field and at least 10 years of senior-level experience in science and technology policy. Interviews are expected to begin at the end of November.
Energy Think Tank Hiring Innovation and Nuclear Advisers
AAAS Hiring Deputy Director for Equity Initiative
The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Equity and Diversity team is seeking a deputy director to lead the SEA (STEMM Equity Achievement) Change initiative, which works with institutions of higher education to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. The deputy director will also contribute to fundraising and research related to other diversity programs. Candidates must have a doctorate in education or STEM field as well as seven to ten years of program management experience. Applications are due Oct. 28.
Know of an upcoming science policy event either inside or outside the Beltway? Email us at fyi@aip.org.
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