NSF Workshop: Supporting Materials Research
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NSF Workshop: Supporting Materials Research Recently the National Science Foundation (NSF) convened a panel of materials representatives from universities, industries, and national laboratories to hold a one-day Workshop on the NSF Advanced Materials and Processing Program (AMPP). A summary of the preliminary Workshop report is given in the Washington News department in this issue of MRS Bulletin. Having been one of the panelists, I here discuss the context for the Workshop. It tells much about the critical need for our community to represent materials research to a broader audience, especially in the current climate of severe budgetary belt-tightening. If the materials community fails to argue effectively for its utility to society, we cannot expect anyone to come to our rescue. The AMPP is one of seven cross-cutting strategic areas1 used by NSF to describe over half of its budget, the balance of funding being distributed to nondesignated areas. The AMPP area currently represents slightly over $200 million in funding, corresponding to approximately 2,000 awards, and covers a wide spectrum of research and education activities ranging from condensed matter and materials physics and materials chemistry and chemical processing to materials science and engineering. The President's FY 1996 budget requested an increase of 6% over FY 1995 for this area, even though the overall NSF budget request increased by only 3%. The purpose of the Workshop was to obtain input from scientists and engineers conducting research in the AMPP area as well as from potential beneficiaries of that research. The input served to assist NSF in responding to a letter of last Fall from the VA, HUD and Independent Agencies Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate requesting a more detailed plan for each of the seven strategic initiatives. This subcommittee, which oversees NSF funding in the Senate and was previously chaired by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), is now chaired by Senator Christopher Bond (RMo.), with Mikulski the ranking minority member. The subcommittee asked NSF, in part, to list key research questions that need to be addressed in order to achieve
IMIRTS MATERIALS RESEARCH SOCIETY
the national goals of each strategic area, and to indicate a small number of milestones that researchers should target for the next one to five years. With this challenging task in mind, William Harris, Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and Joseph Bordogna, Assistant Director for Engineering, as chair and vice-chair respectively of the AMPP strategic area, organized a meeting of 25 panelists on January 12,1995. Many of the panel were members of the Materials Research Society, including past presidents R.P.H. Chang and Russell Chianelli, and 1989 Von Hippel Award recipient John Goodenough. The Workshop was cochaired by Peter Eisenberger of Princeton University and George Whitesides of Harvard University. It was taken as a given that materials research is strategic since materials play an important and often enabling role in our economy as
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