WEEK OF OCT 7, 2024

What’s Ahead

Wilson Hall Fermilab.jpg — The Fermilab campus in Illinois.

(Ryan Postel / Fermilab)

DOE adds two companies to Fermilab management team

The Department of Energy announced last week that two private firms will join the management team of Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois starting in 2025. Amentum and Longenecker & Associates, which have worked for DOE’s national security and environmental remediation programs for decades, are partnering with the current lab managers, the Universities Research Association and the University of Chicago. URA and UChicago have jointly operated Fermilab as the Fermi Research Alliance since 2007, but DOE solicited bids for new managers in January following a period where the lab received low-performance grades. Fermilab management had come under scrutiny in part due to large cost increases on its flagship neutrino project and a serious worker injury that delayed work on a major accelerator upgrade.

The new management team will be called the Fermi Forward Discovery Group and will assume operations after a 90-day transition period that began Oct. 1. The contract is for five years with an option for DOE to extend it up to 15 years if the team demonstrates “exemplary performance.” Fermilab is the leading particle physics laboratory in the U.S., with 2,100 employees and an annual budget of more than $600 million.

NSF board chair pitching new National Defense Education Act

The National Academies’ Board on Higher Education and Workforce will meet Friday to discuss proposals to revamp the National Defense Education Act — a 1958 law that boosted higher education and STEM training following the launch of the first earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union. Darío Gil, chair of the National Science Board and director of research at IBM, will explain the motivation behind advancing a national STEM talent strategy via a new NDEA. Gil has previously said a NDEA 2.0 is necessary to spur new funding for research, inspire a new generation of scientists, and respond to growing competition from China.

OSTP marks progress on scientific integrity

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy reported last week that 19 federal agencies have published the scientific integrity policies required by a 2021 presidential order. OSTP stated the progress report demonstrates the Biden administration has “delivered on its promise to institutionalize a culture of scientific integrity across the federal government.” While some of the 19 agencies have had integrity policies in place for a decade or more, others had to create brand new policies in response to the order. Beyond these 19 agencies, seven agencies are awaiting approval of updates to their prior policies and two agencies have first-time policies pending approval, according to the OSTP report. Five agencies have trained their staff on their new or updated integrity policies while 11 are in the process of doing so and ten have not yet started. The report also states that more than half of agencies have not yet begun developing the evaluation mechanisms required by the 2021 memorandum. Only one agency has fully implemented its evaluation system. The push for stronger scientific integrity policies began in the first weeks of the Biden administration largely in response to scientific integrity scandals during the Trump administration.

Science groups seeking science policy fellows

Attention all scientists looking to gain experience on Capitol Hill or in federal agencies — the application window for several year-long science and technology policy fellowships is now open for positions starting in fall 2025. Applications for the AAAS S&T Policy Fellowship and the APS Congressional Fellowship are due Nov. 1. The deadline for the AIP Congressional Fellowship is Dec. 1, and applicants for the Optica Congressional Fellowship have until Jan. 3 to submit their entry. The application window for AGU’s Congressional Science Fellowship will open Oct. 15 and close Jan. 15. More science policy fellowship opportunities can be found here. (APS and Optica are AIP Member Societies.)

Also on our radar

OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar will discuss the federal government’s role in global R&D competition at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics will be announced on Tuesday. AIP is offering various resources to prepare for the announcement.
NASA has created a new class of missions called “Probe Explorers” that falls between their small-scale and flagship missions. NASA announced last week that two proposals for such missions, one focused on X-rays and the other on infrared observations, will receive $5 million each for a 12-month concept study.
President Joe Biden signed the Building CHIPS in America Act into law last week, exempting certain semiconductor manufacturing projects from environmental reviews.