PCAST reincarnation brings promise for US materials science community
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PCAST reincarnation brings promise for US materials science community whitehouse.gov/ostp
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he materials research community is looking with anticipation at the reinstatement of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), announced last October. Started in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, PCAST has advised the president “on matters involving science and technology policy” in every administration since. In that role, it not only has the power to drive the direction of US science and technology, but has a say in industry and national security. Reinstating the council signals a significant step forward for the state of science policy at the White House and for other policymakers, says David P. Norton, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Florida and chair of the Government Affairs Committee at the Materials Research Society (MRS). Alan Hurd of the National Security Education Center at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, and former Franklin Fellow for the Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State, credits Kelvin K. Droegemeier with resurrecting PCAST. As the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Droegemeier will lead the council. Before becoming the president’s science advisor, Droegemeier researched extreme weather, numerical weather prediction, and data assimilation at The University of Oklahoma. The stated focus on nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and quantum information science, and the far greater number of members in industry compared to academia stood out in PCAST’s introductory announcement. “It is absolutely necessary but not sufficient to have industry as PCAST members,” Hurd says. “This current roster is completely insufficient with its lack of academics so far.” It is a sentiment, he says, that he arrived at after discussions
Members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (from left to right): A.N. Sreeram, Dow Chemical Company; Catherine P. Bessant, Bank of America; Sharon Hrnykow, Cyclo Therapeutics, Inc.; K. Birgitta Whaley, University of California, Berkeley; Shane Wall, HP Labs, HP Inc.; H. Fisk Johnson, S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc.; Dario Gil, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; together with Kelvin K. Droegemeier, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), who will lead the council. Photo taken after the swearing-in ceremony on November 18, 2019. Photo credit: @WHOSTP (White House OSTP twitter handle).
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with colleagues. Hurd thinks it is a positive that high-tech companies are represented, but fears the dearth of academic members means their voice will be muted. “Most of the basic research is coming out of academia and the national labs—that representation is important,” he added. The feeling that PCAST’s membership is skewed too heavily to industry is not universal, however. “We’re not all basic research scientists in MRS,” Norton says. “I really don’t see [academia and industry] as being competitors.” He believes the current PCAS
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