NSF support has meant a lot to me, starting with funding my grad PI, then in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship that gave me an opportunity that I would not have otherwise had. 20 years later, as a staff scientist at a university (after 13 years in industry), I was a co-PI in one of the NSF centers for innovation. The relative flexibility in the NSF directives meant that I could do this without being a tenure-track faculty member.
I was considering becoming a program officer there for the last few years of my career, but obviously that is off the table now.
I once did the math and figured out that I had paid off all of my 'training' NSF support in the form of income taxes a few years after I started working in industry.
Although overhead costs are confusing, the fact remains that research is even more expensive in industry. Back when I was in industry our FTE rate was around $500k/year for a scientist, which was appx 5x the salary at the time. The company I worked at started out as a technology development company that partnered with big chemical companies. We developed the infrastructure and did the research. Over the years we also started selling the equipment and software, but around 2007-8 management started to pivot more towards software, since the cost to scale it were less. It's kind of reminiscent of what the DOGEbros are pushing now with AI. Eventually the company got rid of the research and equipment units and 'merged' the software unit with another company, in what was essentially just a big payout for investors and senior management.
After this experience, I was burnt out on Silicon Valley/tech culture and moved to a university in 2010. I am absolutely appalled at how much worse it has gotten since then.
Thank you for your comment (and I love your user name, wish I’d thought of that for myself!). I wish overhead was better understood. I didn’t get it myself until a few years into my faculty position! I genuinely thought the university was taking money out of my grant . .. !
Liz, thanks for this detailed post. I learned so much! And from the comments (you have such smart readers!). Seems like, in all areas, we’re witnessing the triumph of the bullies who hate scholars and experts and prefer to celebrate ignorance. May it be a temporary glitch.
The high point of my time as a physics professor was when I wrote a proposal to NSF to bring a group undergraduates to tour the national lab where I did my thesis work. It was funded and the trip went off, but it was the year after, I think, when I failed to get tenure and left to become a research faculty member. I remember that the application was tough but fair, and I believe some of the students who went on the trip with me did become successful scientists professionally.
That sounds wonderful. A trip like that is successful whether it recruits students into science or not--just giving them a view of a national lab is educational and demystifying!
Thanks for the post speaking as a temp PD at NSF and former CAREER awardee. Don’t really know where this is headed. But will stay as long as it makes sense for me.
I looked you up-mathematical modeling in the BIO directorate, right up my alley! What a time to be there. Thank you for everything you are doing. I have so much appreciation for PDs and POs right now.
I have had a very different experience with NSF, but that doesn't mean that I derive any pleasure from watching it be gutted. NSF has been a problem parent from the get-go, one that I've needed to distance myself from (and I'm finally doing that, at the end of my career).
Things got off to a good start when I won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to go to grad school, the first from my undergraduate institution to do so. But within a year or so I realized that my Big Ten graduate institution treated NSF Fellows as second-class citizens because they weren't on a specific grant. They were treated like unfunded grad students, having to fight for office space and for any attention at all from faculty. In my own department, there were NSF Fellows who just drifted away and left the university and the field--and of course the students were blamed for this, not the department culture or the university culture. When I told the NSF rep about this during a visit she made to our university in my 2nd or so year of grad school, the rep said, essentially, 'well, that's your problem' and ended the conversation. (I was still idealistic enough to think that NSF would care that their Fellows were getting the shaft from my Ph.D. institution.)
In my post-doctoral and research scientist and professor days (i.e., the past 29 years), NSF has stood for "Insufficient Funds," which is what this acronym means in the finance and business world. I've only received funding once, for a small-to-medium-sized collaborative grant that got funded in the first submission apparently because we knew the program officer well. Otherwise, nope. And the Broader Impacts, which I am especially good at because I am at heart an interdisciplinary researcher and outreach expert, have been received poorly by reviewers. My own NSF CAREER proposal had a really extensive Broader Impacts section, with a plan for validated education and outreach research--far more and far more sophisticated than the Broader Impacts of most funded CAREER grants that I have seen or heard about. And how was it reviewed? One of the reviewers said, in writing, something very close to 'I don't know anything about education, so I skipped that part and didn't read it.' When I complained to the program officer about having reviewers say that they didn't read a part of the proposal that was *supposed* to be important, the program officer at NSF replied, basically, 'Oh, I had very expert researchers reviewing it.' But, but... what about the Broader Impacts? I was later told that NSF CAREER proposals are 100% about the research (which I thought I did a good job on, and so did my mentors) and 0% about Broader Impacts.
As a repeated loser in the grantsmanship game with NSF, I have, perhaps understandably, a different view of NSF than the winners in the game do. I have a real problem with top-down science, which is what NSF does, no matter how much pleading there is to the contrary. From Ben Franklin on down, the best scientists in the pre-WWII era would generally not have done well in the NSF grantsmanship rat-race. (Ben didn't devote enough of his career to science and wouldn't have had enough expertise or papers or citations to get funded for that crazy lightning experiment.) I have largely self-funded my own research, by which I mean putting it on my credit card, doing work that no agency would fund but which turn out to have actual impact in my field and broader impacts on society, especially in terms of public safety. So, ironically, my lack of success with NSF leaves me in a good position right now: I have no grants and no NSF-funded students to worry about. (I do have former undergraduates across the nation who are either losing their jobs as of tonight, or about to lose their jobs.)
I still have a lot of grief about what's happening at NSF, even though I am the rare scientist who would have liked to participate in a rethink and restructuring of how it works. That's because this isn't reform; this is demolition. And the money 'saved' by obliterating American science will not be reinvested into science in ways that will make anything better. I see two main, probably complementary possibilities: 1) the money goes to the billionaires for their own purposes; 2) the dribs and drabs of money left will go to MAGA-friendly projects and MAGA scientists (they do exist, and in a dog-eat-dog funding situation there will be additional cooperators and quislings who side with Trump for reasons of scientific survival), in an imitation of Soviet Lysenkoism. This gutting will leave U.S. science in tatters, and the post-WWII era of our nation being at the pinnacle of science will be over.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I acknowledge that my view of NSF is particularly rosy! I am suprised to hear about your CAREER grant evaluation, but I only sat on two of those panels in a single section, so my experience clearly can't be generalized.
My dream is that there will be the chance to reorganize and restructure after the current burn-it-down, but I have no idea if that will be possible.
I was the Distinguished Research Scientist (i.e Research supervisor) for a NOAA funded center to train students in marine science at an HBCU. We supported three dozen graduate and 50 undergrad students at seven universities and more African American PhDs in marine science than any other program. I mentored REU students every year for a decade. All that is now threatened by the tantrums of our imbecile in chief.
We need many more REUs in the geosciences, not fewer. This is terrible for my current students in atmospheric sciences, whose applications to this summer's REUs hang in presumed limbo.
Shout out to the Finding Your Inner Modeler workshop! The feedback we got from that community inspired us take our project in new and fun directions. The workshop also helped my grad student who at the time was struggling to transition from being a math major to a biology grad student. It was inspiring for the both of us to interact with people who seamlessly combine the two.
Thank you for this Liz ❤️
Thank you for reading!
NSF support has meant a lot to me, starting with funding my grad PI, then in the form of a postdoctoral fellowship that gave me an opportunity that I would not have otherwise had. 20 years later, as a staff scientist at a university (after 13 years in industry), I was a co-PI in one of the NSF centers for innovation. The relative flexibility in the NSF directives meant that I could do this without being a tenure-track faculty member.
I was considering becoming a program officer there for the last few years of my career, but obviously that is off the table now.
I once did the math and figured out that I had paid off all of my 'training' NSF support in the form of income taxes a few years after I started working in industry.
Although overhead costs are confusing, the fact remains that research is even more expensive in industry. Back when I was in industry our FTE rate was around $500k/year for a scientist, which was appx 5x the salary at the time. The company I worked at started out as a technology development company that partnered with big chemical companies. We developed the infrastructure and did the research. Over the years we also started selling the equipment and software, but around 2007-8 management started to pivot more towards software, since the cost to scale it were less. It's kind of reminiscent of what the DOGEbros are pushing now with AI. Eventually the company got rid of the research and equipment units and 'merged' the software unit with another company, in what was essentially just a big payout for investors and senior management.
After this experience, I was burnt out on Silicon Valley/tech culture and moved to a university in 2010. I am absolutely appalled at how much worse it has gotten since then.
Thank you for your comment (and I love your user name, wish I’d thought of that for myself!). I wish overhead was better understood. I didn’t get it myself until a few years into my faculty position! I genuinely thought the university was taking money out of my grant . .. !
Liz, thanks for this detailed post. I learned so much! And from the comments (you have such smart readers!). Seems like, in all areas, we’re witnessing the triumph of the bullies who hate scholars and experts and prefer to celebrate ignorance. May it be a temporary glitch.
May it be so.
The high point of my time as a physics professor was when I wrote a proposal to NSF to bring a group undergraduates to tour the national lab where I did my thesis work. It was funded and the trip went off, but it was the year after, I think, when I failed to get tenure and left to become a research faculty member. I remember that the application was tough but fair, and I believe some of the students who went on the trip with me did become successful scientists professionally.
That sounds wonderful. A trip like that is successful whether it recruits students into science or not--just giving them a view of a national lab is educational and demystifying!
Thanks for the post speaking as a temp PD at NSF and former CAREER awardee. Don’t really know where this is headed. But will stay as long as it makes sense for me.
I looked you up-mathematical modeling in the BIO directorate, right up my alley! What a time to be there. Thank you for everything you are doing. I have so much appreciation for PDs and POs right now.
I have had a very different experience with NSF, but that doesn't mean that I derive any pleasure from watching it be gutted. NSF has been a problem parent from the get-go, one that I've needed to distance myself from (and I'm finally doing that, at the end of my career).
Things got off to a good start when I won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to go to grad school, the first from my undergraduate institution to do so. But within a year or so I realized that my Big Ten graduate institution treated NSF Fellows as second-class citizens because they weren't on a specific grant. They were treated like unfunded grad students, having to fight for office space and for any attention at all from faculty. In my own department, there were NSF Fellows who just drifted away and left the university and the field--and of course the students were blamed for this, not the department culture or the university culture. When I told the NSF rep about this during a visit she made to our university in my 2nd or so year of grad school, the rep said, essentially, 'well, that's your problem' and ended the conversation. (I was still idealistic enough to think that NSF would care that their Fellows were getting the shaft from my Ph.D. institution.)
In my post-doctoral and research scientist and professor days (i.e., the past 29 years), NSF has stood for "Insufficient Funds," which is what this acronym means in the finance and business world. I've only received funding once, for a small-to-medium-sized collaborative grant that got funded in the first submission apparently because we knew the program officer well. Otherwise, nope. And the Broader Impacts, which I am especially good at because I am at heart an interdisciplinary researcher and outreach expert, have been received poorly by reviewers. My own NSF CAREER proposal had a really extensive Broader Impacts section, with a plan for validated education and outreach research--far more and far more sophisticated than the Broader Impacts of most funded CAREER grants that I have seen or heard about. And how was it reviewed? One of the reviewers said, in writing, something very close to 'I don't know anything about education, so I skipped that part and didn't read it.' When I complained to the program officer about having reviewers say that they didn't read a part of the proposal that was *supposed* to be important, the program officer at NSF replied, basically, 'Oh, I had very expert researchers reviewing it.' But, but... what about the Broader Impacts? I was later told that NSF CAREER proposals are 100% about the research (which I thought I did a good job on, and so did my mentors) and 0% about Broader Impacts.
As a repeated loser in the grantsmanship game with NSF, I have, perhaps understandably, a different view of NSF than the winners in the game do. I have a real problem with top-down science, which is what NSF does, no matter how much pleading there is to the contrary. From Ben Franklin on down, the best scientists in the pre-WWII era would generally not have done well in the NSF grantsmanship rat-race. (Ben didn't devote enough of his career to science and wouldn't have had enough expertise or papers or citations to get funded for that crazy lightning experiment.) I have largely self-funded my own research, by which I mean putting it on my credit card, doing work that no agency would fund but which turn out to have actual impact in my field and broader impacts on society, especially in terms of public safety. So, ironically, my lack of success with NSF leaves me in a good position right now: I have no grants and no NSF-funded students to worry about. (I do have former undergraduates across the nation who are either losing their jobs as of tonight, or about to lose their jobs.)
I still have a lot of grief about what's happening at NSF, even though I am the rare scientist who would have liked to participate in a rethink and restructuring of how it works. That's because this isn't reform; this is demolition. And the money 'saved' by obliterating American science will not be reinvested into science in ways that will make anything better. I see two main, probably complementary possibilities: 1) the money goes to the billionaires for their own purposes; 2) the dribs and drabs of money left will go to MAGA-friendly projects and MAGA scientists (they do exist, and in a dog-eat-dog funding situation there will be additional cooperators and quislings who side with Trump for reasons of scientific survival), in an imitation of Soviet Lysenkoism. This gutting will leave U.S. science in tatters, and the post-WWII era of our nation being at the pinnacle of science will be over.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I acknowledge that my view of NSF is particularly rosy! I am suprised to hear about your CAREER grant evaluation, but I only sat on two of those panels in a single section, so my experience clearly can't be generalized.
My dream is that there will be the chance to reorganize and restructure after the current burn-it-down, but I have no idea if that will be possible.
I was the Distinguished Research Scientist (i.e Research supervisor) for a NOAA funded center to train students in marine science at an HBCU. We supported three dozen graduate and 50 undergrad students at seven universities and more African American PhDs in marine science than any other program. I mentored REU students every year for a decade. All that is now threatened by the tantrums of our imbecile in chief.
We need many more REUs in the geosciences, not fewer. This is terrible for my current students in atmospheric sciences, whose applications to this summer's REUs hang in presumed limbo.
Shout out to the Finding Your Inner Modeler workshop! The feedback we got from that community inspired us take our project in new and fun directions. The workshop also helped my grad student who at the time was struggling to transition from being a math major to a biology grad student. It was inspiring for the both of us to interact with people who seamlessly combine the two.
Oh, I love hearing that! They were pretty fun, and David Stone was such a fun person to organize things with.