The National Science Foundation (NSF) Launches NSF Engines Program And Its First New Directorate In Over 30 Years

Established in 1950, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is widely recognized as a leading agency for promoting and funding scientific research and innovation in the United States. The NSF is renowned for its commitment to funding groundbreaking research across various fields including physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, computer science, and social sciences, and plays a crucial role in advancing scientific knowledge and driving technological progress that benefits society as a whole. By providing financial support to researchers, universities, and institutions, the NSF fosters cutting-edge investigations and enables scientists to push the boundaries of knowledge.

Innovation is distributed widely across different regions of the country, and moreover, the NSF is known for its emphasis on interdisciplinary research, promoting collaboration between different scientific disciplines and encouraging the integration of diverse perspectives. This approach acknowledges that innovative approaches to scientific challenges often require expertise from multiple fields and multiple regions to advance the state of science.

On a recent GovFuture podcast, Erwin Gianchandani who is the National Science Foundation’s Assistant Director for the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships shared insights into the new NSF Regional Innovation Engines program and the establishment of NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP), the NSF’s first new directorate in more than 30 years.

Expanding opportunities for innovation across different regions and technology areas

According to Erwin, “a lot of our federal investment over the course of the last several decades as part of the technological boom that we’ve seen in this country and around the world has tended to concentrate on coasts or in big cities. The National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines (“NSF Engines”) Program that launched in May 2022 was officially authorized by Congress as part of the Chips and Science Act legislation (“CHIPS”) that the Congress passed and the President signed into law last summer. The engines program is a bold and transformational investment. The goal of this program is to be able to bring together a variety of different sectors, academia, industry, nonprofits, state, local, tribal, governmental organizations, economic development entities, civil society, and really bring together the full constellation of talent that exists all across the country. And particularly so in what we call regional cohorts.”

He continues, “So you could imagine a region that comprises various communities, maybe a state or two or more that are coming together. They collectively have a shared interest in a particular topic. That topic may be at the intersection of technology like artificial intelligence or advanced wireless or advanced materials and manufacturing and a key societal or economic challenge that we face in that region or as a nation. An example might be agriculture, food and agriculture production and security, for instance. So the idea (and question) is: can we bring together, can we coalesce teams from these various diverse backgrounds and diverse sectors who maybe historically have been operating in a particular region around a common topic, but they’ve only been loosely connected.”

The goal with the Engines program in particular, and as the Director of the NSF likes to say, “create opportunities everywhere by seizing upon the innovation potential that exists everywhere in this country.”

New NSF Awards for Regional Innovation and online NSF Engines Concept Explorer

Along with the Engines program, the NSF is anticipating two types of awards. The first type are development awards, which are smaller scale investments on the order of a million dollars over a couple of years to help a team that’s just starting to come together, fine-tune its vision, develop the topic space of interest, region of service, partners who are coming together, and vision over the next several years. The other type of award is a “full-fledged engine”, where the support level is up to $160 million over up to 10 years. Since that’s a significant amount of investment by NSF and the federal government, there is a significant time horizon as well. The goal with these investments is to be able to enable new technological outputs, new workforce capabilities and outputs, and to train talent at all levels.

As part of the NSF Engines program, NSF unveiled the NSF’s Engines Concept Outline Explorer, an online, free application that the NSF demonstrated at a recent GovFuture Forum event in the Washington, DC area. As a first step for the engines program, NSF would like interested parties to submit concept outlines in three to five pages, which outlines who are coming together in a region, the topic space and region of service. The NSF is then doing something it has never really done as an agency, by taking those concept outlines and putting them onto a public facing dashboard to share the information. The goal with the concept outline explorer is to help teams be able to find one another and engender teaming in order to bring the best of a particular region to bear on the research that’s being proposed, and the workforce development that’s being proposed going forward. The other goal is to bring transparency to the process, by showing what the NSF is doing and what these teams are doing with the resultant outcomes. The explorer is spearheaded by Grace Yuan who is a Data Analytics Officer within the new “TIP Directorate” at NSF.

The new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships

In addition to the new Engines program and Explorer, the NSF announced its first new directorate in over 30 years. The NSF established the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (“TIP”) officially on March 16, 2022. This was the first time in 32 years that the NSF stood up a new directorate.

According to Erwin, “I think many of us here at NSF, starting with the Director on down to the rest of us, really view this as a generational opportunity, more than a generational opportunity for NSF, for the nation’s scientific enterprise and really for the nation as a whole as well. And what’s even more exciting is this was a vision that originated many years ago in the Endless Frontier Act, which was a piece of legislation that Senator Schumer and Senator Young in Congress were encouraging. That legislation evolved in various bits and forms and ultimately became the Chips in Science Act that I mentioned earlier that the President signed into law in August of last year. That legislation specifically calls out the importance of this directorate and authorizes the establishment of this directorate.”

He continues, “There are three reasons that drive the establishment of the TIP directorate today. One is the competition that we face in key technology areas all around the world. Every country, including our adversaries, is investing heavily in AI and wireless in biotechnology and so forth. And for the U.S. to remain competitive in these areas, we need to make comparative investments as well to be able to ensure that we continue to be in the vanguard of competitiveness in those areas.

Secondly, we see the pressing societal and economic challenges that we face that technology can help to address, can help to mitigate, and can help to inform as well. That might mean critical infrastructure challenges that we face. It might mean issues of equity or inequity that we face that have become, I think, very apparent over the last several years, inequity to access to health care or education. And similarly issues around the climate and the changing climate that we face.

And so as you think about the socioeconomic challenges as you think about those critical technology areas, there’s also a third dimension, which is being able to engage the full breadth of talent that exists all across the country. Many would argue that America’s unique asset is the diversity that we have all across this country. And similarly, when you think about those tech areas, it’s important that the individuals designing the technologies have the same demography as the individuals who are using those technologies in every bit as much as if you think about the socioeconomic challenges that I talked about. Those are sort of three key drivers that I think have led us to sort of an inflection point for the scientific enterprise and the value that the scientific enterprise can bring to the nation when it comes to accelerating tech development, accelerating the translation of technology to practice to society, and accelerating workforce development as well.”

The TIP directorate is focused on “bringing society to the table”. As Erwin states, “Let’s bring the users, the beneficiaries, the consumers of the research that we’re enabling. Let’s have them come to the table and motivate and inspire the use cases that drive the research agenda. And let’s let them have them because they’re at the table from the start, they’re co designing co creating solutions, they’re helping to pilot and prototype solutions.”

There’s more detail about the NSF Engines program and TIP directorate in the GovFuture podcast episode, with some insights on how to get involved. The NSF plays a crucial role in shaping national science policy, providing recommendations to policymakers and advocating for the importance of scientific research in addressing societal needs and challenges.