Engineering Science - On the Hill

NSF in the crosshairs

2010-12-02T16:06:00Z

The New York Times recently launched a crowdsourcing initiative to see how people would choose to balance the federal budget. The Times gave people the option to pick and choose from a collection of budget cutting measures that had been proposed by various committees and think tanks: The Simpson/Bowles deficit commission, the Cato Institute, the Sustainable Defense Task Force, etc. Savings for each of the initiatives were calculated by the Congressional Budget Office, the Tax Policy Center, and various economists. Overall, they presented people with a balanced, sanity checked set of choices and asked them to choose among them. It's been an interesting exercise with some results that have been surprising (at least to me).

The Republicans, perhaps inspired by the Times, have decided to undertake their own crowdsourced budget cutting project. Their initial phase involves having people identify "wasteful" NSF spending. Unlike the Times' project, this one is more of a free-for-all, with participants being egged on to attack specific projects.

Step One: Look for Questionable Grants Click here to open the National Science Foundation website. In the "Search Award For" field, try some keywords, such as: success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus, etc. to bring up grants. If you find a grant that you believe is a waste of your tax dollars, be sure to record the award number.

Step Two: Submit Award Numbers Use this form to submit the award numbers of grants that you believe are wasteful; we will publish a report outlining the grants identified by the YouCut community.

If you search on the suggested terms, you come up with some surprising presumed targets.

A search for "success" yields as its first result a grant in support of UMBC's very successful program to increase minority participation in the sciences. Is this really the kind of thing we want to go after in budget cutting?

"culture" turns up lots of things on bacterial culture, but also a grant that looks at Latino youth learning and development and one that looks at free software development. Not being an sociologist, I can't speak to the value of the first grant, but in my own field, free software is incredibly important, and understanding the preconditions for successful open source projects is vital. There are few more cost-effective ways of supporting IT than encouraging more open source / free software development.

I have no idea what "media" is meant to turn up. Perhaps this grant on the ethics of synthetic biology? Given how potentially scary synthetic bio could turn out to be, thinking about ethics early seems like a wise move. Maybe this (awesome sounding!) grant in support of automated identification of emotional state? Seems like a great way to pinpoint potential terrorists in crowds or to have your computer respond to you in ways appropriate to your mood.

I challenge readers to figure out what specific grants Eric Cantor had in mind for the suggested search terms.

Look out, NSF grant recipients. Your fates may be about to be decided by the masses.

Obama's Science Budget

2010-02-02T02:54:00Z

Wired has a handy chart of which agencies get what in Obama's new budget proposal. The NIH gets an extra $1 billion, NSF, NASA, and the EPA each get an extra $500M, and a few others get smaller increases. Only the CDC's budget gets chopped.

Given that the proposed budget comes with a giant helping of deficit spending it's unlikely that these raises will make it through intact. NIH's proposed budget increase (3.2%) is right on par with inflation (2.7%), so if it gets reduced, expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

White House Roundtable

2007-11-15T06:02:00Z

Peter and I have just returned from "Evolving Demands in Graduate Education, Training and Career Development for Future STEM Professionals," a workshop hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The meeting was in some ways a testament to the potential of young scientists and engineers to influence the community. Sharon Hays, the organizer, is a life scientist who earned her PhD during the last big downturn for scientists in the mid 1990's. As a result of her experiences in grad school and on the market during the 90's, she has had a longstanding interest in science careers, and she is now in a position to do something about them: she is the Deputy Director of OSTP.

Around the table were most of the key people involved in the support and training of graduate students in the United States along with a number of thought leaders from academia and industry. If ever there was an opportunity to explore this issue with all the stakeholders present – this was the time.

The meeting was also a reminder of the extreme inertia of the scientific world: 10 years ago, many of the same people (Sharon, Peter, Finley Austin, and myself) assembled at a similar meeting hosted by Congressman and physicist Vern Ehlers. As Sharon noted in her closing remarks last week, many of the slides shown at the meeting in 2007 could have been taken straight from the 1997 meeting.

Sharon opened the meeting with several questions:

Why are graduate students trained with a near singular focus on becoming academics when smaller and smaller numbers of these students actually go on to being academics?
Why does it take so long to earn a PhD? MD/PhD programs prove that the time can be made shorter: in 7 years, everyone earns both a PhD and an MD.
Can we better predict supply and demand for scientists and engineers?
How can we fix problems without undermining the science and engineering enterprise that is dependent upon low-cost graduate students and postdocs?

A few quick highlights of the meeting:

Are producing too many scientists? People are still asking this question, and there was considerable disagreement on the answer.
- Michael Teitelbaum made a compelling empirical argument for an oversupply - young scientists' wages are low and many people have considerable difficulties finding jobs - and raised concerns about the upcoming NSF budget doubling.
- Charlotte Kuh presented an interesting argument that overproduction was built in to the system as a result of incentives for the various actors in the system being incompatible with desired outcomes.
- All the industry people (Pfizer, Dow, Hoffman-La Roche) reported considerable difficulty in finding suitable hires.
- David Skorton, President of Cornell, argued vigorously that the problem is simply that not enough Federal money is being invested in science and engineering.
How are things in the trenches? We had a great panel of grad students and postdocs who related their own experiences. It's not clear how representative the 4 people were of grad students on the whole, but to the extent that they are, some positive things are going on. Some common themes that emerged from their stories:
- Most of the panelists had not gone straight through from undergrad to graduate studies and had pursued interesting paths in between. They went to grad school thinking that a PhD would lead to enjoyable work and give them control over their careers.
- All reported having received little to no career guidance along the way.
- Most were planning to pursue non-academic careers because of perceptions that life as a professor is undesirable - it's a career that leaves no time for family or anything else but work.
- Despite sounding happy about choosing not to pursue academic careers, most sounded a little defensive about their nonacademic goals.
- 2 of the 4 grad students were strongly influenced by NSF’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. The REU gave them a window on research science that they found really enticing. Several wished they had had the opportunity to have explored something similar in industry.
- Several reported receiving some positive structured career guidance in the form of a disciplinary society workshop. All wished they had had such an experience earlier in their graduate careers and thought that it would have been most effective earlier on.
- All wished they had had more exposure to opportunities in industry early on in their educations.

My take away was that there are a few real opportunities for OSTP to improve things:

1) The recent NIH budget doubling is a useful negative case study. Some Federal resources invested in understanding what went wrong and in better resource planning could go a long way toward preventing similar problems with NSF's upcoming doubling and with future human resources planning in general. Funding an external agency like the Bureau of Labor Statistics to do the work would be particularly useful: BLS has relevant expertise that is simply not a core competency of NIH/NSF/DOE/NIST/etc; and the BLS budget would not be affected by their findings about national needs for S&E, so the conflicts of interest that affect NIH/NSF's existing resource planning (projections of future work force needs influence Congressional appropriations to NSF/NIH/etc) would go away.

2) There was broad consensus at the meeting that giving students more exposure to careers in industry would be very productive. One hurdle is that it is expensive and time consuming for universities to establish and maintain the kind of industrial ties that the envisioned internships / interactions would require. Having NSF and especially NIH (since NSF already does this kind of thing to a limited extent) allocate some substantial resources in this direction would be another way OSTP could have a big impact.

3) It would be useful to fund structured guidance (i.e. workshops / classes rather than occasional suggestions from an advisor). Disciplinary societies are filling some of the vacuum left by NSF's decision to stop analyzing its own data on S&E's, but the quality and timeliness is all over the map. Some funding to help disciplinary societies provide good data to students and faculty members would be useful as would funding for institution-level services at graduate student and postdoc offices.

Two more ideas from Peter:

4) Funding graduate students directly on research grants (as opposed to supporting them on fellowships) was discussed at several points. Directly coupling PhD production to research funding is nice for PIs because it gives them a ready and eager source of cheap labor and total control of that labor. However the direct coupling ties PhD production to R&D funding levels – which invariably creates a boom/bust cycle of PhD production. Michael Teitelbaum made a point of this with respect to NSF: for every one graduate student supported on an NSF fellowship, 12 students were supported directly on grants. If you double NSF funding over the next 10 years you are signing up for a substantial increase in PhD production. Teitelbaum argued that this NSF should lower this ratio substantially (presumably by funding more fellowships relative to grad student slots on R&D proposals). This idea of decoupling the funding for graduate students from the funding of research is not new – it was a central idea that came out of the LAST crisis. Back then, the idea was to empower graduate students to make their own choices as to who to train with and what projects to undertake. But if you look at the ratios of fellowships to support through research funds since 1990 the proportion on fellowship support hasn’t budged.

5) A mismatch between supply and demand. Despite the abundant data showing the indicators of overproduction of PhDs in some fields (this time – Life Sciences) the folks from industry insisted that attracting skilled scientists and engineers was a challenge. Several industry folks explained that it was not simply a question of supply of PhDs but rather PhDs with the suitable skills and INCLINATION to consider industry jobs. One of the industry reps highlighted the “Rodney Dangerfield” syndrome that many technical managers feel: they can’t get the respect of their peers in academia who train and counsel graduate students. Furthermore, the supply/demand issue is very field-specific. Presently in the Life Sciences we are producing too many academic-oriented PhDs: WAY too many for the available funding streams. However, in Computer Sciences, PhD grads (at least according to the Dean of one top-tier department) are beating away the recruiters with sticks.

One thing that has changed since the last PhD glut is the avenues for communication. Peter and I have invited the Roundtable participants to join this blog to share their observations and ideas. We will also post the presentations that are made available.

Bring Back the Office of Technology Assessment

2007-09-19T16:31:00Z

There's a great idea floating around science blogs: bring back the White House Office of Technology Assessment:

It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable. Chris Mooney described it as Congress engaging in "a stunning act of self-lobotomy" in his book the Republican War on Science (RWOS at Amazon).

The fact of the matter is that our government is currently operating without any real scientific analysis of policy. Any member can introduce whatever set of facts they want, by employing some crank think tank to cherry-pick the scientific literature to suit any ideological agenda. This is truly should be a non-partisan issue. Everybody should want the government to be operating from one set of facts, ideally facts investigated by an independent body within the congress that is fiercely non-partisan, to set the bounds of legitimate debate. Everybody should want policy and policy debates to be based upon sound scientific ground. Everybody should want evidence-based government.

Seems like a good way to help ensure that policies are made using the best available science (plus it will create a few good science jobs!)

More here

America COMPETES Act

2007-08-13T14:06:00Z

America COMPETES, the NSF reauthorization bill, has been signed into law, and the bill contains a lot of good stuff. Many of the provisions I wrote about earlier have survived the conference committee and made it through to the final bill:

Postdoc training: The postdoc mentoring provision is more or less unchanged:

SEC. 7008. POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOWS.

(a) Mentoring- The Director shall require that all grant applications that include funding to support postdoctoral researchers include a description of the mentoring activities that will be provided for such individuals, and shall ensure that this part of the application is evaluated under the Foundation's broader impacts merit review criterion. Mentoring activities may include career counseling, training in preparing grant applications, guidance on ways to improve teaching skills, and training in research ethics.

(b) Reports- The Director shall require that annual reports and the final report for research grants that include funding to support postdoctoral researchers include a description of the mentoring activities provided to such researchers.

Communication skills: The Scientific Communications Act got folded in but without any funding. I don't know if a "sense of Congress" statement has any real weight.

SEC. 7035. SENSE OF CONGRESS ON COMMUNICATIONS TRAINING FOR SCIENTISTS.

(a) Sense of Congress- It is the sense of Congress that institutions of higher education receiving awards under the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program of the Foundation should, among the activities supported under these awards, train graduate students in the communication of the substance and importance of their research to nonscientist audiences.

(b) Report to Congress- Not later than 3 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Director shall transmit a report to the Committee on Science and Technology of the House of Representatives and to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions of the Senate, describing the training programs described in subsection (a) provided to graduate students who participated in the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program. The report shall include data on the number of graduate students trained and a description of the types of activities funded.

IGERT received a big chunk of money - $82M for 2009
Professional Science Masters programs got modest funding ($12M in 2009), but they are spending it on smart things: (1) a program to help PSM programs share information to make it easier for new PSM programs to be established, and (2) establishing evaluation procedures for existing and new programs.