Office of Polar Programs Advisory Committee Update
National Science Foundation (NSF)
For further information, please go to:
http://nsf.gov/od/opp/advisory.jsp
Or contact:
Andi Lloyd, Chair, OPP OAC
Email: Lloyd [at] middlebury.edu
Dear members of the polar research community,
I write to update you on activities of the Office of Polar Programs
(OPP) Advisory Committee (OAC). The OPP OAC is a panel of experts, whose
function is to provide "guidance, recommendations, and oversight in such
areas as how OPP can best serve science, promote education, increase
workforce diversity, and set investment priorities." The committee
charter and an overview of our activities can be found at:
http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/opp_advisory/oac_charter.jsp.
The committee convened in Arlington, Virginia, 4-5 May for our spring
meeting. A brief summary of the key discussions at the meeting follows.
1) The OAC was briefed on a number of recent events:
a. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Additional funds made
available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be
supporting standard grants, Major Research Equipment & Facilities
grants, Academic Research Infrastructure, and Major Research
Instrumentation grants. (Solicitations for MRI and ARI have been
announced and are posted on the OPP website:
http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=OPP.) Support for young
investigators, through additional funds to the CAREER and IGERT
programs, will be a key goal.
b. U.S. Arctic Policy Statement: The statement, released 9 January
2009, is available online
(http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-66.htm). We discussed the
implications of the new policy statement for international
collaborations and the potential for improved access to some parts
of the Arctic.
c. Arctic Council and Antarctic Treaty Joint Meeting: We were
briefed on the discussions at the recent Antarctic Treaty
Consultative Meeting (held jointly with the Arctic Council, 6-17
April 2009). Discussions centered on issues of safety, tourism, and
transportation. There was apparently discussion at the meeting of
the possibility of conducting an Antarctic Assessment, but no
resolution was reached on that issue.
2) We discussed plans to build on progress made during the International
Polar Year (IPY). Martin Jeffries briefed us on a recent Arctic Council
meeting that focused on building on the legacy of IPY with the
development of a Sustained Arctic Observing Network.
3) As part of that discussion, we agreed that robust data-sharing and
archiving policies were a key component to the IPY legacy. The OAC felt
that OPP already has a good track record of encouraging robust data
management practices, and encouraged OPP to act as a leader within NSF
and in international efforts to stimulate more widespread support for
(and enforcement of) data-sharing and archiving policies.
4) We made plans for the upcoming Committee of Visitors (COV) reviews of
Antarctic Science (ANT), Antarctic Infrastructure and Logistics (AIL),
and Arctic Science. COVs are panels of experts that are convened
approximately every three years to assess program operations and the
contribution of awardees to achieving NSF strategic goals. An overview
of the COV process (and links to COV reports) can be found at:
http://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/activities/cov/. The ANT and AIL COVs will be
meeting simultaneously in order to allow them to jointly assess the
interactions between Antarctic Science and Antarctic Infrastructure and
Logistics. COV meetings will occur sometime next fall, and reports will
be made available to the public after that point.
5) We met with NSF Director Dr. Arden Bement, and Acting Deputy Director
Dr. Cora Marrett, for a wide-ranging discussion of how the science
priorities of the Obama administration affect NSF, of IPY follow-up
activities, and of the challenges of 'greening' science logistics.
6) We were briefed by Karl Erb (OPP), Tim Killeen (Directorate for
Geosciences), Jim Collins (Directorate for Biological Sciences) and
David Lightfoot (Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic
Sciences) about an NSF Climate Change Research Initiative that is being
developed by the four directorates. Details of the program, including
budget and research priorities, are being finalized, but the hope is
that a solicitation will be forthcoming within the next year. The OAC
expressed support for the program, and we had a wide-ranging discussion
of the opportunities for and challenges of doing integrative,
inter-disciplinary climate change science.
7) We discussed a variety of logistics issues related to resupply of
McMurdo Station. At the time of the meeting, there was an open Request
For Proposals (RFP) for an ice-capable Antarctic Research and Supply
Vessel. That RFP can be accessed at:
https://www.fbo.gov/spg/NSF/DACS/DACS/_not_applicable/listing.html. As
part of our discussion of Antarctic logistics, we discussed steps OPP
might take to reduce the vulnerability of polar research to fluctuating
oil prices. The OAC agreed that as part of that effort, it would be
helpful to estimate the current energy and/or carbon footprint of polar
operations, to be available as a benchmark against which progress could
be measured. The OAC agreed that Antarctic logistics issues were part
of a larger strategic planning process, and we discussed how the OAC
could best provide input to OPP to guide future investments and to
insure that OPP activities were consistent with NSF-wide strategic
goals. The OAC thus agreed to create a subcommittee to begin a 12-month
process of developing a 'visions' document for OPP. A sub-committee of
four members of the OAC, working with an OPP staff member, will develop
an outline of what this document might achieve by the fall meeting, with
a goal of completing the document by spring 2010.
8) We discussed the Broader Impacts merit review criteria. These were
identified by both 2003 and 2006 Committee of Visitors reports as being
a point of difficulty in the review process. Our sense in the discussion
was that PIs are getting better, over time, at coming up with
innovative, meaningful broader impacts, and that panels are taking the
broader impacts criterion seriously. We agreed that most PI confusion is
about the scope of the broader impacts criteria - in particular about
knowing how much is enough. OPP program directors reiterated that NSF
decided deliberately not to weight the relative importance of the two
merit review criteria, specifically because the importance of each will
vary among proposals. We agreed that the values of PI institutions
played a critical role in determining the degree to which PIs felt
motivated to devote significant time and resources to "broader impacts"-
the value placed on educational and outreach activities clearly varies
among institutions, and this will continue to influence the energy and
resources that PIs allocate to these activities. We were reminded that
NSF provides representative "broader impacts" activities on its website.
That document is linked to this description of the broader impacts
criterion: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07046/nsf07046.jsp.
9) We ended the meeting discussing Transformational Research, which has
been an area of emphasis at NSF of late. Neil Swanberg, Program Director
for ARCSS, started the discussion with a very helpful definition of
transformative research: transformative research encompasses ideas,
discoveries, and/or tools that radically change practice or lead to new
(and perhaps unexpected) paradigms. We discussed the challenges of
identifying transformative research. OPP has decided to set aside a
separate pool of funds to encourage "high risk/high payoff" projects. We
discussed the multitude of ways in which a proposal could be perceived
as being "high risk"- because the ideas are untested, for example, or
because the PI or methods are untested. Program directors commented that
the former (high risk ideas) tend to review quite well, whereas the
latter (high risk methods or PI) are more problematic in the review
process. We discussed the need to track transformative research, and to
identify how potentially transformative research fares during standard
solicitations and review panels.
The full minutes of our meeting will be posted on the OPP OAC website in
the near future (http://nsf.gov/od/opp/advisory.jsp). You can also find
there a full list of OAC members. Please feel free to contact me, or any
other committee member, with questions or concerns at any point. We are
always open to hearing your thoughts and concerns, and will do our best
to relay those ideas and concerns to the Office of Polar Programs at our
meetings.
- Andi Lloyd
Chair, OPP OAC
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont 05753
Email: Lloyd [at] middlebury.edu