NSF FEATURES

      On several occasions, President Karen R. Hitchcock has challenged University at Albany faculty and staff to ramp up University research activities so that UAlbany will be able to attain Carnegie Research University I status in the near future.
    Vice President for Research Christopher F. D’Elia said he was ready to meet that challenge when he came on board last year.  A major way to help meet the challenge, he said, is to encourage and help UAlbany researchers pursue federal funding more aggressively and strategically - to maximize success rates in grant applications, achieve larger awards, strengthen research programs, and develop new interdisciplinary collaborations.
    And the “fit” between the research that the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds and the research that UAlbany faculty conduct is, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart at the end of “Casablanca,” so close that it “could be the start of a beautiful relationship.”
    Established in 1950, the NSF is an independent U.S. government agency with a unique mission:  to strengthen the overall health of U.S. science and engineering across a broad and expanding frontier.
    Though it operates no laboratories itself, NSF makes merit-based grants and cooperative agreements and provides other forms of support to educators and researchers in all 50 states and in the U.S. territories. NSF sees its role as supporting projects that:
 

• build and communicate a deep and broad fundamental science and engineering knowledge base;
• develop a diverse, internationally competitive and globally engaged scientific and engineering workforce; and
• provide a broadly accessible, state-of-the-art science and engineering infrastructure.

    NSF supports education and training at all levels, from pre-kindergarten through career development; promotes public understanding of science, mathematics, engineering and technology; and helps ensure that the U.S. has world-class scientists, mathematicians and engineers.
    Competition for NSF awards is intense.  Of the approximately 30,000 proposals NSF receives each year, only about one-third are funded.  And NSF’s budget always has been small, compared to those of other federal agencies that sponsor research.
    From federal FY 1997 to 2000, for example, NSF’s budget increased from $3.4 billion to just under $4 billion, while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget grew from $12.7 billion to $17.8 billion.  For FY 2001, President Clinton has proposed a 17 percent increase for NSF, to $4.57 billion, and a 5.6 percent increase for NIH, to $18.8 billion.
    Its 50th anniversary materials boast that NSF is “where discoveries begin.”  And those discoveries cover a wide range of territory.  All but one of the last 15 Nobel Prize winners was a NSF grantee prior to winning the award.  In 1999, no fewer than seven of the approximately 30 MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winners had previously received an NSF grant - and many MacArthur winners do not even work in academe.
    NSF’s Engineering Directorate funded a five-year study by engineers, geologists and social scientists that noted how natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes cost the U.S. half a billion dollars a week - and recommended how those losses can be reduced in the future.
    The average NSF award is $73,000.  At UAlbany, active NSF-funded research currently totals about $10 million - with the amounts for specific grants ranging from $3,000 (to the Department of Chemistry’s Ramaswamy Sarma) to $1 million (to Sharon Dawes, director of the Center for Technology in Government) and $1.3 million for Dan Wulff’s project to train high school science teachers how to teach science research techniques.
    Biologists Colin Izzard and John Schmidt were able to obtain a confocal laser scanning microscope and image analysis system that will be used by cell and molecular biologists and neurobiologists and their students, with a $434,000 NSF award in 1998.
    Physicist William Lanford received $480,000 from NSF to develop a compact, broad range magnetic spectrometer; anthropologist Robert Jarvenpa and archaeologist Hetty Jo Brumbach traveled to Finnish Lapland to study gender roles in herding and managing reindeer, thanks to a $204,500 NSF award.
    Chemist Harry Frisch received $423,000 over five years for preparing new interpenetrating polymer blends; sociologist John Logan received $323,000 to study residential and labor force positions of ethnic and racial groups in New York City and Chicago between 1900 and 1920; and atmospheric scientists Lance Bosart, John Molinari, Wei-Chyung Wang, Vincent Idone, Mark Kritz and Qilong Min all are listed as principal investigators of active NSF awards ranging from $57,000 to nearly $600,000.
    There is much opportunity for even more UAlbany success at NSF, D’Elia noted in an interview last year.  UAlbany has long been strong in public policy research and the social sciences.  As the neurosciences take hold and East Campus biomedical research grows, the funding opportunities grow, too.
    At the same time, biomedical research offers much promise for society. New discoveries in pharmaceuticals, diagnostic tests and biomaterials can lead to better ways to fight disease. There is great opportunity in this field for collaboration. In addition, new pharmaceuticals mean new products for businesses.
    “As partnerships and collaborations develop with other institutions, our region will benefit tremendously: the collaboration of state agencies, RPI, Albany Medical College, and Albany College of Pharmacy will give a critical mass of regional capability in biotechnology that will be world-class,” D’Elia said in a previous interview.
    “With our capabilities in biology, psychology and public health, we are well-positioned to develop exceptional interdisciplinary programs in this area,” D'Elia said. “The ramifications are astounding, the potential benefits to humankind are enormous, and the dollars needed to support research in this area are growing.”

   Jeryl L. Mumpower had the privilege of
seeing and learning how U.S. research funding policy is made.  In fact, he even got to make some of it.
    Mumpower is currently serving in the Academic Affairs office as associate provost and associate vice president, overseeing the areas of academic information systems and technology and graduate studies.  His “regular job” is as a professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy.
    But from 1998-99, Mumpower worked at National Science Foundation (NSF) headquarters in Arlington, Va., as manager of the Decision, Risk and Management Science program in the NSF's Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.  This was his second tour of duty at NSF; he previously worked there from 1980-84 as a program manager and policy analyst.
    “It’s a rare and exciting opportunity to be able to shape the direction of the field you're in for years to come,” Mumpower says.  Under the NSF’s unique structure, he notes, program officers - the equivalent of faculty members at a university - play the single largest role in determining which research proposals are approved for funding.
    Mumpower’s recent NSF tour of duty was under the federal Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program, which reimburses the employers for the salary of people who go to work temporarily for the federal government.  NSF also pays a living allowance to reduce the cost of maintaining a temporary residence, and pays the cost for program officers to return to their home institutions in order to keep up on their research.
    While he was director in the 1980s, Erich Bloch dramatically increased the use of the IPA program at NSF.  The goal was to bring in “fresh blood,” new ideas and extra energy, yet still save money because the agency did not have to give these employees permanent status and federal benefits.  Today, about 40 percent of the 1,200 people at NSF - including assistant directors of the agency - are temporary employees.
    Mumpower is surprised that more of his UAlbany colleagues have not taken the same opportunity to work at NSF.  According to Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs Bill Hedberg and Assistant Vice President for Research Garrett Sanders (whose office handles the funding, processing and paper work) Mumpower and Mathematics and Statistics Professor Joe Jenkins are the only UAlbany faculty members to have gone on NSF detail in the past several years (Jenkins retired from the University, but stayed as an NSF employee. Professor of Biological Sciences Joseph Mascarenhas was at NSF from 1985-87).
    “I would recommend it highly,” says Mumpower.  “It’s a good opportunity for people who have experience in their fields to use it, and a good opportunity for people who aren’t that experienced to become better known.  You get a great deal of satisfaction from doing community service.  The NSF has a very clever system, one that gives program officers a great deal of discretion as they review proposals, yet also ensures that they receive the advice and counsel of their peers from all over the country.”
    Mumpower was impressed by the collegiality of NSF - particularly regular weekly brown bag lunches where program officers in the directorate met with, got to know, and learned from others.  “It’s like a department meeting, except your department has a much more diverse range of backgrounds and experience,” he says.
    Always the behavioral scientist, Mumpower says the best evidence of the value of the NSF system and structure “is in the outcomes - and they have been excellent.” 
    In fact, the only downside he sees to his tour of duty is that “most of the work is cumulative; you won’t see the results of a particular program or proposal for many years.  In that way, nothing you start ever gets finished while you’re there.”

    It took the National Science Founda-
tion (NSF) a while to realize that University at Albany Professor of Biological Sciences Dan Wulff really was on to something, with his proposal to teach high school science teachers how to teach science research techniques.  And it took the NSF rejection of his first proposal for Wulff to realize how he could make it even better.
    The end result is the single largest current award from the NSF to a UAlbany professor - a $1.3 million, five-year grant made last year that will be used to train 280 high school science teachers in New York, California, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri and West Virginia how to teach a unique three-year science research course.
    Wulff was teaching and serving as dean of what was then UAlbany’s College of Science and Mathematics when he learned about a unique program run by a science teacher at Byram Hills High School in Westchester County.
     “I was directing the Upstate New York Science and Humanities Symposium (for high school students), and I noticed that one particular high school, Byram Hills in Armonk, was dominating the competition.  I learned that a teacher there, Dr. Robert Pavlica, had developed a whole new way to teach people how to conduct research, and he was willing to share his knowledge with other teachers.”
    But without resources to pay for the training and to motivate teachers to attend these sessions, Wulff said, “the best we could have hoped for was to reach about 20 teachers a year and give them each 15 hours of training.”  So Wulff submitted a proposal to the NSF’s Directorate for Education and Human Resources, seeking funding to bring the program to more teachers.
    His proposal was rejected.  “They had some misconceptions about what we were trying to do, but they also had some very good reasons for turning the project down.  The most important reason was the cost - they rightly felt that the cost of the program per teacher was way too high.  They also wanted us to make the school systems whose teachers were taking the course invest in it - so we added a mechanism whereby the costs would be shared by the participating school systems.”
    The NSF official wondered how Wulff and Pavlica would convince college and university professors to participate.  Wulff says, “When we told him that the students themselves would call the professors, not us  - and he realized that hardly any professor would turn down a high school student who asked him to be his or her mentor - he reared back in his chair, put his hand on his forehead, and realized what was happening.”
    The first award, in 1996, was for three years and $409,000 - with Wulff, Pavlica and Leonard Behr, the first high school teacher trained by Pavlica, as co-principal investigators. During those three years, 90 teachers from throughout New York State spent 120 hours (three weeks) in an intensive summer workshop with senior scientists and students, following the process of taking students from a broad topic of interest to a defined research problem.
    The summer session was followed up during the academic year by six meetings that focused on solving problems that arose during the implementation of the techniques and networking.
    Last year’s $1.3 million award will train science and mathematics teachers in the six states - and by the end of the grant, a third of New York’s 800 public high schools and 30 private schools will have established a science research course.
    “If you’ve seen the movie ‘October Sky,’ says Wulff, “that’s what science research is about.  Students getting excited about research, and adults helping them.  What will be the long-term effect of offering this course?  We don’t know, but it has to be positive.”
    “We already know,” Wulff says, “that most Westinghouse-Intel Science Award winners from New York are in schools that offer a science research course, and we know that students who take the course and continue their research in college say they are able to perform like first-year graduate students, rather than like undergraduates.”
 

UAlbany Hosts 15th Annual Junior Science and Human- ities Symposium April 6-7     More than 500 teenaged scientists from upstate New York and their teachers will gather in Albany April 6-7 to share their research findings at the 15th annual Upstate New York Junior Science & Humanities Symposium.     The University will host the symposium, which is funded by the U.S. departments of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. The program begins at 2 p.m. at the Holiday Inn Turf, 205 Wolf Road, Albany, and concludes the following day. Participants will also have opportunities to tour University research facilities and various Capital Region science and research venues.      Students making oral presentations compete for a $4,000 scholarship, with the recipient chosen from a field of five finalists - one from each of the April 7 oral sessions at the Holiday Turf  Inn. The winner will be announced Friday afternoon.