April 5, 2007
Praising NSF support: Provost Wise promotes younger reseachers in congressional testimony
The reauthorization of the National Science Foundation offers the country an opportunity to strengthen its commitment to the pursuit of basic research.
In recent testimony before the Research and Science Education Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, Provost Phyllis Wise noted that it should also be an occasion to emphasize the importance of supporting the research of junior investigators, postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students who play a major role in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education.
Wise spoke not merely as the UW provost but also as a longtime federally funded investigator. Her first research grant came from NSF in 1975 and today she still holds NIH grants.
“The reauthorization of the National Science Foundation presents an unprecedented opportunity to renew and reinvigorate the national commitment to excellence,” she said. “It is wise that Congress…has elected to enhance an agenda that would spur discovery and encourage young Americans to get involved in these scientific frontiers.”
Wise pointed out that while the UW makes sizable investments in junior new faculty in the form of recruitment packages, these packages seldom include sufficient research funding for the two or three years it usually takes to establish a productive research program.
Wise lauded NSF for its Presidential Early Career Award intended to recognize outstanding junior faculty. However, this program “does not solve the problem of how we maintain a vibrant cohort of junior faculty that represent the future of academic research, but who require research funding in their earlier years simply to survive in an increasingly competitive environment.
“I encourage NSF to take additional bold steps to ensure that promising junior faculty have the opportunity to succeed,” she said. She endorsed the proposal for a new program, “Small Grants for Exploratory Research,” in which excellent proposals from young faculty that are not funded through merit review can be funded for one year at the direction of the program officer.
Wise also talked about the essential role of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in the research enterprise.
“They do not make policy nor do they lead grants as principal investigators, but the success of any research or the performance of any laboratory depends on these energetic and creative minds.”
The recruitment and retention of faculty is also linked to graduate student support.
The common model for support of graduate students has been research assistantships, but this approach is not a good way to support interdisciplinary research. Wise proposed expansion of the IGERT program — Interdisciplinary Gradate Education Research and Training — which coincides with the growing body of interdisciplinary research on the nation’s campuses.
Wise also praised a proposal to increase NSF’s investments in infrastructure through its Major Research Insrumentation program. “This is an age where tools for science have become the science in almost every discipline,” she said.
“The manipulation of large complex databases is revolutionizing every field and the scramble for funds to pay for the development of the next generation of instrumentation for research and research training is enormous.”
Wise concluded by noting that the university-NSF partnership is “extraordinary.”
“Science has moved from behind the scenes to the center of the stage in terms of helping our nation to stay competitive.
“We need to harness the human potential in every American kid and facilitate the efforts of those who do choose careers in research by streamlining the processes and making them more accessible.”
