Hi, everyone, and welcome to our panel. My name is Kate Huntington, and I'm a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and also a member of the course committee. So I'd like to thank you for taking the time to join us today, both in person and Kendra, once we can, once we'll be able to hear you remotely. And so, as you know, it's part of our statement of task for this committee. We were asked to explore opportunities for EAR to partner with different groups across NSF. And we were also asked to identify infrastructure relevant to earth science research across the foundation. And so what we're really hoping is that today's discussion will help us better understand the landscape and NSF so we can get a sense for what partnerships already exist, what opportunities might be out there to better leverage those existing partnerships or to form new partnerships and make new connections. And so I believe that Deb has asked you to begin with a brief presentation. Some people have PowerPoints, others have remarks, both are great. And so I'd like to, what we'll do is we'll start with those. And in particular, the questions or the presentations, we are hoping would address some of the guiding questions that are provided in the printed booklet that we have for the agenda. And so just to get right to it, I'll just, I'll say that the community input that the committee has gotten and that's on the public record has highlighted the need to cross the shoreline in particular and also the lower barriers between EAR and ocean sciences. And so what we'll do is we'll start our panel with remarks from ocean sciences and we'll aim for about 10 or 12 minutes, something like that. And then five to seven minutes for each of the other panelists as our, as Deb has I think sent you in advance. But first I'd like to just start with an introduction of the panelists briefly. So we have Terry Quinn, Professor at UT Austin currently serving as Director of the Division of Ocean Sciences. Also from the Division of Ocean Sciences, we have Candace Major, who's the lead program director in the Marine Geology and Geophysics program. We have Anjuli Basmai, Director of the Division of Atmospheric and Geo-Space Sciences. We have Brandy Schottel, Associate Program Director for the Environmental Engineering and Sustainability Cluster in the Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems or CBET. See that? I don't know. If I pronounce the acronyms wrong, you'll have to educate me. You don't have sound bites on the website when you click on them to tell the people from the other divisions. Next we have, joining us remotely, Kendra McLaughlin, who's a professor at Kansas State University and Program Director in the Ecosystem Science Cluster in the Division of Environmental Biology, Biological Sciences Directorate, who's also involved with navigating the new Arctic and dimensions of biodiversity working groups at NSF. Then we also have Jessica Robin, who serves as the country's and region's cluster lead in the Office of International Science and Engineering and works in several other interdisciplinary working groups at NSF and has previously worked in the Geosciences Directorate. More detailed bios are also available in the printed agenda, and speakers, please feel free to share relevant information about yourselves as we go. Now we'll just give time for our, oh, look, we have that, Kendra. We can see you now, Kendra. Hello. Great. Hopefully you can hear us at all. And now we'll just get right to your presentations and your remarks. And then a moderated discussion in which we can, we made it deeper onto some of the topics that you touch upon or that were in the guiding questions, and we'll open it, mostly just open it up to the committee for questions and discussion. So if you're ready, could we get started with ocean sciences, please? Yes, please do use the microphones so that everyone listening in online can hear us. So apparently I passed the first test. I got the microphone to work, so it's always good. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. My name is Terry Quinn, and I'm just settling in on my one-year anniversary in Division Director of Ocean Sciences. And that usually means I know enough to get in trouble, so I'll try to stay out of trouble in my conversations today for that. But I would like to say that I'll start off with a little sort of a broad overview as the Division Director in the Geo Directorate, where we have Bill Easterling as the AD there. And we are really privileged and proud to be able to work with Anjali Bumsai from AGS and Lena Patina from EAR and Kelly Faulkner, who's not here today. But I think the leadership team is actually a really strong one. We get along well. We have robust and dynamic discussions amongst us, and there's a real spirit of collegiality and collaboration amongst the Division Director. So I think there's a fertile field to plow in these areas, where there's some natural areas, I think, and I'll talk about this in a second. But I also would like to let people know we just announced last week that Candace Majors has been named the new Section Head for the Marine Geoscience Section. So I'm really, again, very proud to have Candace part of the executive team in Ocean Sciences. And she joins Bob Houtman on the infrastructure side and Lisa Clough on the Ocean Sciences side for that. So, yeah, so we're poised to do great things. I think there's a lot of really interesting, great time to be at NSF as a rotator. I think in particular, my background, I come from the Institute for Geophysics. I'm from the University of Texas, although I'm a paleo-scientographer and paleo-climatologist. And so, but that brings a certain set of expertise and an experience with me that I think it provides a nice dovetail with some of the things that this course group is looking at. Geophysics is a natural place that crosses the land to divide, right? And so if you want to study seismology, you need to do it from all perspectives and so you have great experience from leading the Institute for Geophysics for a long time, then also paleo-climate, right? Another area where paleo-climate is reconstructed both from the ocean and the land, so there are natural areas in which there are some interactions between EAR and OCE. And then there's your geochemistry. And my background in training is mass spectrometry. So geochemistry is another one of those whether you're measuring isotopes and waters, sea waters or ground waters, you're measuring in some sedimentary archive is another area that there's some natural areas where there's some expertise to be done there. And also I spent a long time working in the, using coral reefs and so coastal environments are very important to me. Another area where I think there's natural collaborations between EAR and OCE. Andrea is here, another person who knows that very, very well in terms of being able to both reconstruct climate but sea level, for example, and using tectonics to help you understand the role of sea level change. So I think in those four broad areas, there's just a real natural areas that we can interact, EAR and OCE. And I know that Lena and I have had a bunch of discussions and there's a versioning working group that's being developed by the program officers who have come together on their own to sort of say, hey, with geoprisms winding down, what are the next steps? Where can EAR and OCE collaborate some more? And so again, a large group of program officers got together to drive this and so we're just in the nation stages of that. But again, a great opportunity for things to come together and I'm excited to work with Lena and others in EAR for that. And then I would be remiss if I didn't mention COPE, Coastlines and People. Again, a new investment at NSF into areas that again, in the sort of the graywater areas, but also very importantly, bringing in the impacts of people. So science-informed policy decision-making, for example. And back in the day, Jim knows his, we had this job a number of years ago. So the bluewater oceanography was sort of the mainstay of OCE, but now with the investment in the regional class research vessels, three are going to be coastal vessels or run by Oregon State University. One out on the Taney, which is out on the west coast and the resolution, which is from the east coast consortium for that. And then we have the competition for the third one just closed in July 1st. And so we will be looking at that. So again, NSF is making large investments in areas that have interest to actually cross this sort of land-sea divide, if you will. So that's what excites me. One of the reasons to come to NSF was for that actual reason. So to work together across this divide because it's a dirt system doesn't really know the divide. We tend from both an academic standpoint in our home institutions of silos of excellence versus NSF, where also we have similar silos of excellence with slightly different names. But the challenges are also there for that. So I'm excited to work together with folks. We've already done a bit of that and historically through OCE and the AR. And so I'm happy to answer additional questions as we move forward. I think at this point, I'd like to pass on to Candice and she had a few remarks. Is there any way to get the figure up? So I might, I'll just expand on some of the things that Terry said with some more specifics about investments we've made in the recent past between EAR and OCE and also some of the joint programs that you may have heard about already. So the MG and G marine geology and geophysics is probably the biggest partner for EAR in the ocean sciences, but it is by no means the only partner. So I wanted to put this up because the structure of ocean sciences is a little different from Earth Sciences but we do have four science programs. They're rather large broad programs. They are split into two sections and it's a little hard to see here but there is a biological oceanography program, physical oceanography that are part of the ocean section and then marine geology and geophysics and chemical oceanography that are the marine geosciences section and then there is a third section that deals with facilities, the ship operations and all the associated tools and instrumentation. So the marine geology program where I've been for about 11 years now is the one on the far left. We have four program directors in that program and the two big long-standing programs that are partnerships with EAR sit within that core program. They are not separate programs but they are part of the marine geology and geophysics core program. Those are geoprisms and the paleo perspectives on climate change program and both of those are decadal programs that are coming toward their end and they will be, geoprisms I believe has one more competition and P2C2 maybe two more competitions. Those will be reviewed and the future of where those communities go is up for discussion right now. It's likely that new programs will evolve or those will be reverted into the core programs. So that's a discussion. In terms of specific investments, there have been a number in the solid earth on the solid earth side. Much of it through geoprisms, big investments in subduction zone science. The Cascadia initiative involved large arrays of ocean bottom and terrestrial seismometers to look at structures of the subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest. Similarly, we have an experiment that's out right now in the Aleutians and also a similar scale of experiments in Hikurangi in New Zealand. So all of those are big. All of them involve both offshore and onshore components and some of that has been done through geoprisms. Much of it has been done through geoprisms as some of their focus sites, but a huge amount of it has been supported through the core programs in EAR and ocean sciences. So I know we're pretty much at our 10 minutes right now and we've barely scratched the surface of the first question. So I hope that we'll be able to come back to some of the other ones so we can move this along. But I did want to mention it before passing it to Anjali that we have recently assembled a working group of program directors in OCE and EAR to talk about some of the process and topical challenges to working across the divisions. We do feel that these large experiments that we've supported over decades really demonstrate our interest and willingness to work across the shoreline. There are some challenges like the infrastructure that we use, both the ships in ocean sciences, big community centers like Iris and Unavco and the Sage Engage Awards on the EAR side. But we are actively pursuing better ways of working through these partnerships and supporting the science that crosses the shoreline. So we can come back to this. I know we have until about 12.15 for this discussion so we can revisit the other questions. Thank you very much. So let's hear from Anjali.  Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to be here. I recall I was here on a previous occasion for the sea change report which was OCE. So AGS of the service of EAR now. Yeah, I'd like to give you an idea of the baseline of what our interactions are thus far. And then maybe speculate something on what might we have where we might further strengthen our interactions. Next slide. So I'm going to talk about some of the jointly funded projects with the AGS programs and then there's NCAR's WALF hydro modeling system that we've worked at our national center, National Center for Atmospheric Research which is one of the sections in AGS. And then there are geo-wide interactions. You heard about P2C2, Candice just mentioned that. And then we've also worked with EAR colleagues on PREVENT which was a divisional wide, rather geo-wide activity. And then there are interactions on the educational efforts, the REU in particular. We also interact with the EAR colleagues on cross-directed slash NSF-wide activities. For example, Infuse which was innovations at the nexus of food energy water systems. Tom Torgerson and Junguloo were actually the co-chairs and they worked actively towards this most recent competition or the awards have been made, I guess. There's also a couple of natural human systems where geo-bio and SBE make awards which are at the interface of geo-EAR oftentimes. And of course we have the NSF 10 big ideas and three of them are, I think, relevant for our interactions with EAR and the awards are going to be made later this summer so we'll see how PEI is made. NSF is a very community-driven organization so the ideas are reviewed. And so whilst we like to take strategic long-term views it's also, the community has to be, we have to have buy-in from the community. Next slide. So I'm going to focus mainly on the top thing, the AGS EAR. So I'm starting out with an org chart. We have three sections in AGS. We have the atmosphere section, the NCAR and facilities section and the geo-space section. And wherever I looked at the, I searched the database and I looked for more than one award jointly made with any of the programs and so you'll find that with Black. And Black is where we have good, robust interactions which is with physical and dynamic metrology, climate, large-scale dynamics, education and interdisciplinary activities. And when I have the dotted line or the dashed line it's where it's kind of modest so we don't have, but we've had at least one co-funded project in the past decade, which isn't much, but nevertheless there have been some ideas that have resonated with the reviewers as well as with the program officers and they've gone forward. P2C2, we have an independent, dedicated program called PaleoClimate in the atmosphere section. Now the PaleoClimate program is mainly about reconstructions of proxies and the instrumental period or climate dynamic studying just made, oh the proxy period, sorry, 2K, after 2K they go. And with P2C2 it goes further back and we also, it's also placed within the context of contemporary climate. And of course I'm sure that some of you in the room would have been P2C2 PI so I'm preaching to the choir here. And then with NCAR there's recently been, in partnership with NOAA, NSF, NCAR has developed the Weather Research Forecast Hydro Modeling System and it's actually been operationalized to the National Water Center at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. So it's a resource for the EAR community, those that are working on hydroclimate issues, weather, et cetera. Next slide. We can skip this one. Yeah, let's just skip this one. So yeah, towards building a geo-wide REU community. So there is a concerted effort by PO's in AGS, EAR and OCE. Every other year joint PI meetings are held and one of the divisions takes the leadership for organizing the PI meeting for the REU PIs. They're also setting up a resource center for the PIs and co-mentering a summer intern to kind of analyze the data from the REU sites and also the program officers want to send consistent guidance about the expectations for the REU sites. So there's some kind of quite a robust collaboration and I think it goes back to the days when I was working on the educational activities. Next one. So these are the science teams that I've got on the left. I've got EAR co-funding with AGS and then AGS co-funding with EAR, so which are the programs that take the lead and when I've got it in bold it means there's substantial funding. And if it's like one or two projects I've left it without highlighting in bold black. So some of that have typically been funded hydrometology, hydroclimate, flooding particularly in the urban environment, land surface coupling, drought you know, excess flooding due to hurricanes and on the longer time scales there's also been some very interesting projects which are looking at climate dynamics the lessons or the insights we have from contemporary climate dynamics and applying it to the paleo rapid. So Tibetan Plateau Uplift we did a very interesting project co-funded with climate large scale dynamics and continental dynamics I think was the name of the program at that point. There's also interesting projects on trace gas emissions from seismic activity. So we recently just launched a rapid so there was a volcano and someone wanted to study and send the measurements and see how that works. I think that might be the last one. Yeah, so summary we have substantial bilateral interactions and then there's a warf hydro modeling system of interest to EARPIs we have a standing partnership on P2C2 as well as the REU activity and there's modest interactions with aeronomy, magnetospheric physics and atmospheric chemistry. Yeah, and I've got a list actually if you go to the next one with more detail so let's back up for you. Thank you and everyone is keeping exactly perfectly on time within 30 seconds and so impressed. So next if we could hear from Brandi. Yeah, and I have slides too although if you can't find them they're not horribly necessary. Okay, so there. Alright, so go ahead and go to the first for the second slide you all know who I am. So I'm Brandi Shaddle I am a program director in Seabed.  I just wanted to give you a little overview of engineering. We actually have six divisions in engineering and believe it or not there is a lot of overlap with DO programs. I'm here representing Seabed one of our three core divisions right now and again by no means the only overlap. We may have the most overlap in our unsolicited programs due to the cluster that I am in but I'm going to highlight a couple of cross directorate initiatives that we either have in the past or ongoing right now or even in the future. So please next slide. So here's my division we have 16 core programs arranged into four clusters. The cluster I'm going to focus on is the third one from the left for you all the environmental engineering and sustainability cluster that has three core programs plus two extra program directors here. The two core programs that probably work the most across GO are with the most are environmental engineering and environmental sustainability. Within the past five or six years environmental engineering has exploded in size and become very multidisciplinary. We have a lot of overlap with atmospheric chemistry in many cases as well as throughout chemistry and EAR. Same thing with environmental sustainability which is a highly interdisciplinary program. I want to point out there to Jim Jones who is the engineering co-chair along with Tom Torgerson of Nfuse. Nfuse actually was every single directorate in NSF plus USDA NIFA the co-chair designation I almost feel like is a punishment for those who are co-chairs, any of you who have ever done these things and I've flipped into this role as well. However that initiative is winding down we just finished our last competition and we're working on the awards and I believe it's scheduled to end in 2020 if I'm not mistaken. So please next slide. So one of my roles is since I don't run a core program I actually tend to run all of our cross-directorate initiatives particularly when they touch environmental sustainability. We recently hired similar people like me and the other clusters but up until recently I was the person so it's kind of nice to have the pass off there and I also run all of our international programs and CBET and in some cases for all of engineering and it's rather interesting to see how we're crossing over with some of our GEO initiatives. Signals in the soil started a year ago GEO has been a major partner in this. This is actually when it started it was for directorates engineering, biosize and GEO and then we had USDA NIFA was part of it as well and you'll notice here I have this proposed multi-directorate multi-agency initiative that actually happened this year and I'll talk a little bit about that We had a large workshop to kind of inform us on this idea this fell out of infuse, the idea that a lot of our soil models are really outdated and our methods for testing soil are really static you go into the ground and you pull up stuff and you take it back to the lab and then you test it and so it wasn't keeping up with some of the things that they needed it to do in infuse as well as some other initiatives and so we had a DCL last year with the four events I mentioned calling for eager and raise awards on four major teams. We need novel sensors that can dynamically measure multiple properties at once they need to be low power, self-calibrating because you want to leave them in ground they also need to be able to send signals wirelessly through heterogeneous media. There's all kinds of problems with this and then of course when you're collecting that kind of data dynamically you have major data problems and data analytics issues and of course how are you going to put these into new models and then make decision support tools for modeling entire ecosystems so I do have a link there to the list of the awards however also that year with GEO and this is with IIP that industrial innovation and partnerships directorate we had a DCL out and it's still current calling for planning grants for industry, university and cooperative research centers on signals in the soil topics and size of GEO partner on that and that continued this year as well. So next slide please this year we had those four directorates plus USDA NIFA officially as well as four research councils of the United Kingdom involved in the signals in the soil solicitation which we're currently also wrapping up for this year. We added one more theme we're looking at signals between species in soil as well so there's a lot of overlap there but it was open game for whoever could come up with ideas and so we plan on continuing that next year. Next slide please and then I'm not going to steal the thunder on a lot of this there's a lot of programs listed here so NSF is moving towards urban systems and communities in the 21st century is a somewhat new initiative that's cross cutting across the foundation there's a we have a website that talks about all these different programs I've got a link here. There's four of them listed here two of them that are already ongoing and two that are emerging I know Bill is going to talk about coastlines and people extensively tomorrow but I am going to give a shout out to sustainable urban systems which she is also a part of we are planning to launch this next year we have no idea what this is going to look like this is based on some interactions with the community as well again as stuff that came out of infuse, risk and resilience and some of the other data that was telling us that this is going to be really important in the future right now we're in the process of putting on roughly 20 to 27 workshops this summer I've got a link there to all the workshop awards right now that the community is going to help us help inform us on what shape this needs to take and so there also could potentially be a lot of community partners as well involved in that and I think there is a lot of overlap between COPE and SUF as well out there along with the LTER here that we have in smart connected communities so next slide please and then the final one I want to mention this is a past international opportunity we typically like to renew this one every year because it's with NSFC NSF China it's topically related and this is a direct collaboration with GOEAR where we promote international collaboration between US and Chinese researchers where they undergo separate review processes but we make the final decision together on specific topics of importance to environmental sustainability one of our core programs in hydrologic sciences in GOEAR we've brought it for the past two years now with GO we're assuming the topic may be the same we may add another topic it rotates but it's just another example of some of the international opportunities there as well and I think I'll stop there thank you very much could we get Kendra back and hear from her hey can everyone hear me okay much better thank you we can hear you great okay so I don't have any slides and I'm going to essentially go through your questions in exact order that you presented them thank you so I am representing the bio directorate today we have four divisions I don't have an org chart for you but I am in a division of environmental biology that has 20 program officers about 15 staff and we're led by a division director and deputy division director that we you know feeling pretty good about our leadership at the moment also I'm in the ecosystem science cluster that's one of four clusters in the division of environmental biology and within that cluster I'm one of five program officers and we really work as a unit I'd like to just kind of say our culture is one of teamwork and communication we have a lot of workflows a lot of protocols a lot of standardized procedures and we are really efficient due to our proposal load so these are some things that struck me coming from a university workplace and I think within SF we do have reputation for being really organized and came oriented so that's the first question about like just what earth science research is supported by our division I can't take the time right now to name all the earth science research supported it would just take too long but certainly within our cluster within ecosystem science there's quite a bit because we study material and energy flow in the biosphere and abiotic components as well so we work with the EAR programs quite a bit in terms of soil water occasional atmospheric flexes and things like that and then within the division all four of our units do co-review quite a bit with EAR programs so the main mechanism of interaction between ecosystem science and EAR programs is co-review of unsolicited program or sorry, unsolicited proposals to core programs so as I'll explain in a minute we have a pretty good mechanism for this type of collaboration a couple of other people have referred to you know the kind of lifeblood of NSF is these investigator driven proposals and that's really how we interact the most right now there's a variety of potential interactions to face emerging questions a model for this moving ahead might be some of the other co-funded programs that were mentioned such as couple natural human systems or the long-term ecological research network that various parts of geo kind of pay into and have also you know kind of jointly developed with BIO program officers another opportunity for EAR BIO partnerships coming up I think it's around the new solicitation for the macro systems program macro systems is a program that's been going on for about six, seven years in BIO and we're really trying to think about its future we've seen a lot of interest from OPAIs and since Earth Systems play a prominent role in continental scale dynamics I think it could be relatively easy to figure out a way to formalize this partnership to mutual benefit. I'll talk a little bit more about macro systems and neon in a little bit about the second question on what specific EAR supported infrastructure do our PIs currently use this was an extremely telling question because when I floated this around my group and ecosystems and in DEB we were really stumped you know just nothing kind of sprang to mind and I think this was really telling I was like where would we even go to find a list of EAR supported infrastructure you know I can search the award database as well as anyone else but we were kind of struggling to kind of find a unified list of structure codes that you know we might use to try to identify what EAR infrastructure was being used I do know just anecdotally in the last couple of years that we our PIs have used we've been happy to support in some cases radio carbon facilities certainly eco-ecological radio carbon our PIs make use of sediment pouring facility called LATCOR and we certainly interact strongly with the CVO network so just to kind of throw a few examples out from the last couple of years I do know there's also cyber infrastructure that's used that geo-supported cyber infrastructure that's used by some of our PIs but I'd like to also kind of turn this question on its head and say that now BIO has its first facility which is NEON and we do not have a long history of facilities like geo does but we now do have our first facility and I have a few ideas at the end I'd like to throw out for how EAR could partner with us on that the third question is about the relative value that we place on interdisciplinary versus our core programs and I would say I mean it's hard to know what to measure or quantify I would say this is extremely high value on interdisciplinary programs it's variable from year to year but it's almost equal I would say between core and its interdisciplinary. I base that partly on publicly available data on co-funding our program co-funds between 10 and 30% of our proposals so obviously co-review is obviously higher and further PO time so each program of the third ecosystem is on one or two in one case three cross-cutting programs as well as the core ecosystem program so many of us in BIO have served on invested quite a bit of time in the programs mentioned by others including Cope, SITS, CNH navigating a new particular and other programs barriers are the time and energy to plan and build new initiatives while you're kind of managing your workload and the proposals coming in and I will say because of the big ideas at the moment a lot of us have been pretty flat out working on those ideas it's been hard to kind of carve out additional initiatives additionally I do think that the leadership kind of plans initiative at the directorate level and I'm not sure how much communication there is among ADs or assistant directors of each unit the mechanisms we use to find out about new initiatives I'll say there's a fair amount of physical separation in the building but we do communicate pretty well via email we use a lot of brown bags or invited speakers within agency and people are pretty good certainly EAR program officers are great about reaching out to us when there's something like that we do I think have good communication between bio and EAR program officers friendship, collaboration we're on the same working group sometimes we do run into each other in the cafeteria so there's a fair amount of communication I'd say another way that we find out about programs in EAR is sometimes PIs contact us and it's the first we've heard of a new initiative and that happened this year with Frontier Research and Earth Sciences the PREZ initiative at AGU it was a bit of a surprise when some of our PIs said oh well there's a bit in the solicitation where there's a formal request to program officers and other directorates or divisions to get written approval for co-review and we thought wow okay that's interesting so that was an area where that kind of caught us by surprise and it was our PIs who communicated that to us obstacles for collaboration just more communication I think again I think communication is good at the moment but it could be improved with additional opportunities I think building in communication opportunities would be useful and we have seen the PI community kind of organizing around we saw a workshop last year around networking of the network so we're kind of what's the similarities and differences among LTER CZO and NEON as networks that was an interesting workshop finally about international collaborations and asset sharing so Brandy you know covered this really really well they've been on the forefront of some of this international stuff I will say on my own experience with international stuff that I've seen developed and maintained in DEB has been a cautionary tale we also have a program with NSFC of China this is a dimensions of biodiversity program we've worked very very hard to develop these MOUs with these agencies in China South Africa and Brazil creating and maintaining these partnerships is very very difficult GEOs joined us on these programs through at least biological oceanography over the years but it's really hard to trust the other agencies review process and as Brandy alluded make the joint funding decisions that can be a lot of trust involved there I don't have any particular recommendations for where EAR could build international collaborations like this but just to kind of say a lot of work but it can pay off for truly international questions and I'll just close by saying there's a clear and logical opportunity for EAR to share the asset of NEON again this is a huge NSF investment almost half a billion dollars in building this network the national ecological it is only in the US so that's one issue but it just provides this opportunity I think for EAR-PIs and possibly on the EAR program to think about these continental scale questions types of sensor and technology work the kind of data interoperability and democratization that we've seen in other programs so I'll leave it there and we can pick anything back up we'd like later Thank you very much so last but not least we look forward to hearing from Jessica okay so hello it's a pleasure to be here to discuss partnerships I've been at NSF almost 12 years now so in addition to my work in international I did spend three years in the division of Earth Sciences where I managed the Geomorphology Manus Dynamics program I also worked on critical zone observatories it was very nice to catch up with Bill on what's going on with his CCO I also spent time on detail in the mathematical sciences directorate working on their large facilities so I'm going to focus my remarks a bit on international and then some lessons learned because I have been involved with a couple of these cross foundational interdisciplinary initiatives SEES the sustainability initiative which really was a precursor to some of the programs we see now such as COPE, Infuse navigating the new Arctic Prevents I've also been involved with the RAISE mechanism so that's the mechanism to support high risk high reward interdisciplinary research at NSF and then I've been involved in the big ideas on convergence so regarding international OSC our office is really the focal point of international activities at NSF and we're located within the office of the director so that gives us a unique vantage point across the foundation and what we do is we represent NSF's intersection of science and foreign policy and then we also identify opportunities for international science cooperation and help the directorates make those partnerships and so some of the ones that you just heard regarding China, Brazil, South Africa the UK we work very closely on those we work really closely on those agreements I think some of the points that Kendra raised in terms of how do you manage these joint programs it's not always so intuitive and easy so we spend quite a bit of time on that but we also have some programs in OSC and I want to highlight those because I think they provide really rich opportunities for the EAR community now many of you might be familiar with our flagship program PIR partnerships for international research and education and this the goal of PIR is really to support high quality projects which advance research and education that could not occur without the international collaboration now these are really large by the year awards usually on average of four and a half million dollars many of these are interdisciplinary and they leverage the expertise of all the international partners involved in the particular project now the program started in 2005 we've supported over 75 projects across all NSF disciplinary programs and I want to emphasize that all of our solicitations are for any part of NSF now with that said EAR has had a very large disciplinary footprint in those 75 awards I would say that all of the core programs of EAR have been represented in at least one if not more of those projects additionally they span the entire globe ok and many of these projects tend to be multiple countries so I think EAR has done a very good job in that program the solicitation is currently being revised with a release in 2021 we usually run that program every two years now another program we have is our IRIS program international research and education for students program which I would really encourage the community to look more closely at because we've revised this program quite a bit it supports active research partnerships by undergraduate and graduate students in high quality international research education and professional development experiences this is an annual solicitation we have three tracks and the awards range from $150,000 up to a million dollars now the track one is our traditional track it's very much like an international REU but you have options to include graduate students we have a track two now which are short term advanced studies courses targeted for advanced graduate students and then we have a track three this is our largest awards of up to a million dollars and what this is is really looking at supporting institutional collaborations to develop implement innovative models for high impact large-scale international research and professional development targeted at US graduate students and then our third program is our newest program this is ExcelNet accelerating research through international network to network collaborations how's that for a mouthful this aims to foster networks of networks collaborations creating links between multiple networks and I want to stress the multiple part across international boundaries to accelerate scientific discoveries now the program leverages expertise data facilities and or resources to stimulate critical research advances now these networks can vary in size and maturity but most but must consist beyond an individual network so this is how they are a bit unique from the RCN program that many of you might be familiar with and they must have or will have in the course of the project develop protocols for communication collaboration data management intellectual property shared use infrastructure and other network activities facilities or products that reduce barriers for international collaboration so I think this really touches on what some of the other panelists have talked about in terms of difficulties when we do international collaboration now this year is our first competition we're in the process of making these awards and the next competition will start in October and I was listening in on yesterday's panel on cyber infrastructure and earth cube right and I think one of the points that was raised was the different access to data and data standards across countries right and so Excelnet was specifically designed to tackle these sorts of questions and I would really urge the community to look at this program because I think this could be a real opening for many of the things that were discussed yesterday so hopefully I still have a couple minutes I'm trying to talk real fast I just want to close with some lessons learned from an external evaluation that we did related to the initiative now for those of you who might not be as familiar with CEAS it was established in 2010 with the overall mission to advance science engineering education related to sustainability the initiative was motivated by several national science board, NRC as well as advisory committee reports and the Geoscience directorate with very active involvement from EAR leadership role in the foundation for this initiative now it spanned eight years right so this is a bit longer than most of our initiatives and it ended 2017 and it was a total investment of $980 million I'm not sure if everybody realizes that because it was 17 different cross foundational programs that we had okay and like I said many of these have continued on through these newer initiatives now so two sort of closing remarks in terms of lessons learned from CEAS that I think many of my panelists will say will concur and it sort of follows some of their comments is that language matters right and so with CEAS the solicitation language and the review criteria which we spent a lot of time working on so it was consistent across all these programs really played a pivotal role in the composition of the research teams the integration of those research teams the network building and the stakeholder engagement but on the flip side the community reports really played a pivotal role in how we designed the programs and so we do really listen to what the community says in terms of the needs of the foundation and then the second point is regarding workload which I think has come up time and time again so the implementation of CEAS was challenging and I know many of my colleagues remember quite well that experience due to the increased workload on the program officers involved and the new programmatic structure that required these coordination across multiple directorates I mean I often joke that sometimes it's easier to work with the international collaborators than across the NSF directorates because it's very different structures and how we run our programs so I would say positive steps is like Brandi's position in engineering where she is solely focused on these cost foundational and international types of programs whereas with CEAS what we were having our program officers run their core programs and in addition to these competitions so it created a lot of extra work and so I do think as the NSF is moving forward we've really learned some lessons and we're looking at different ways to organize ourselves and I would really encourage you to watch the convergence accelerator space and see where that leads in terms of how we structure ourselves for these very big initiatives moving forward and I'll stop there. Thank you very much. So thank you to all the panelists for laying out the landscape for us and now I'd like to start by opening it up to questions from the panel please wave your name flags okay Karolina please. Yes Karolina let's go back to Lonnie. I am a member of the committee. I guess I want to thank you for coming. I found that really sort of enlightening and in particular I've come back to the U.S. from the UK after 10 years in the UK and I think I'd like to say that there's nothing comparable to NSF anywhere else and the quality of NSF programs and the thinking connection to the community is really quite unique and I just wanted to put that out there because NERC for example it's kind of a horrible agency but okay sorry the question is actually for the OCE I actually have a question for OCE and then AGS in terms of OCE you answered a lot of our questions in terms of cross cross-strait whatever sort of collaborations at the sea land boundary and I guess given sort of the community input that we've had and the next sort of big stage of trying to understand the Earth and Earth's interior or even things that are related to the big problems coming up in terms of large large earthquakes or great earthquakes that happen the subduction on science where you've invested sort of a lot of money do you see any other challenges or any other opportunities in sort of that collaboration that become more organic just than just co-funding or breaking down any sort of bureaucratic or issues that you know come a boundary of this sea land device Thanks for the question I think part of it is the understanding that the desire to break down those boundaries we actually want to get less stovepipes and so this working group that's being developed is a great example of that we want to hear input from the community through the program officers and to define what these next priorities might be so for example what's going to come after geoprisms that's a community decision to sort of communicate to NSF for us to sort of think about but there's lots of sort of opportunities to go there and I think some of these experiments that we've done either on Hikarangi or Cascadia are great examples of these sort of collaborations that can be continued into the future with that so I think there are some good examples to pull from and I think the community is poised to sort of continue to try to work together and work poised to sort of work together to make that happen within the foundation so SC4D being one community yeah maybe I'll just add to that and I was going to mention SC4D so I think the point there is that we don't have a solution but we very much want to work with the community to find out what the priorities are so that we can figure out a way to implement them and so SC4D you know we've had a lot of meetings and conversations with community members over the last couple of years and we keep stressing that what we want is for them to evolve the concept of like what do you really want and it's still kind of coalescing so there's an iterative process between the community stating needs and priorities and NSF helping to shape how we actually implement those so it's a back and forth conversation there are you know there are certainly some priorities that have been stated by both the ocean sciences and our sciences communities the thing that has come up in pretty much every single one of those meetings over the last few years is the need for geodesy we have a fairly well developed process for offshore seismic ocean bottom seismometers and a lot of those big experiments are onshore seismic experiments but we don't really have a facility scale solution for geodesy at this point and so we've heard that and now our challenge is to implement that solution yet but we are working on it and if I could ask the question of the AGS it's more of a sort of amusing you said that the sort of collaborations between EAR and AGS on the issue of magnetospheric physics and things like that are sort of moderate to mile but there are areas that I think become very important in the future perhaps also with engineering related to the generation of the magnetic field and the evolution of the magnetic field and the interaction between what's internally generated with sort of what's coming from the sun or whatever and the impact of that on technology so do you envision that those collaborations may grow that you may integrate a little bit with innovative engineering because of communication issues that may come up in the future right I had I glossed over our the largest FFR DC that NSF has which is NCAR which is in our division and at NCAR we have several activities one of them being the community earth system modeling which has several working groups and there's a land modeling working group there's an atmosphere modeling working group there's an ocean modeling working group there's applications so hydrology was considered one of the initial applications in that working group so taking it for decision making robust science for decision making so in addition to the CES and activity we also have an earth observing laboratory at NCAR through which our field campaigns take place and we worked in the past with field campaigns with OCE so they bring their ships their assets and we have our airplanes etc. at NCAR which go to the field but coming back more directly to your question yes indeed in the CESM there's an attempt to go up in the vertical beyond the stratosphere with the whole atmosphere model include atmospheric chemistry and then all the way the aspirational goal is actually to go way above like perhaps from sun to earth and then study some of the phenomena so coupling of right now we're not there yet so the geospace science community has its own set of models I think they work closely with NASA on these so the ionosphere modeling the ionosphere so some of you may know the CEDA gem and shine communities they have their workshops so they're getting that part and eventually there will be a coupling with the lower atmosphere so the aspirational goal is indeed to look at the integrated atmosphere and if I may say the integrated earth system as well is crazy you okay? okay I have a sort of two part question because our theme here is the collaboration of AR with across the directorate and I heard two models and I wanted to get a feeling amongst you of the weight of those two one is the individual PI says I want to work across and the other is somehow a program happens and the reputation of the individual PI is commonly slaughter that is you put in a proposal and you go to that panel and they say this is not enough biology and you go to that panel it's not enough hydrology and I think that's a common experience and I can understand because you know we have our different expertise that affects our outcome so there's no reviewing question there that I'm curious whether you struggle with it all and then the second thing is it seems like a solution has been to try to find these programs where you have separate reviews because you have a common interest and the question I have there is how do you decide on these programs I don't know where prevents came from for example and it's going away how do you do this I know you listen to the community and you have to decide on how many programs you're going to have and where does that come from so I realize so much philosophical but we actually need to hear this in terms of what recommendations we can make there's several in engineering it actually happens a lot because engineering has its hands in all the different sciences as well and so a lot of our divisions are already interdisciplinary and we even have problems within our own division about proposals that could easily sit on more than one panel in our division we do co-panels sometimes it's easy within a division when you start spreading out sometimes it's just co-review that could be a disadvantage or an advantage depending on what's going on the ideas do primarily come from the community but at least the ones that I've been a part of throughout the years and I've watched evolving you know we get a lot of ideas from the community but we really try to take care about setting aside money from core programs associated with problems that just really aren't being addressed yet in a core program already so when infuse started one of my tasks I was a data analyst back then was to look across the foundation to see what we were already funding potentially in this area where all three systems were covered it was not a lot all right and we were getting a lot of input from the community about the system so there was a whole bunch of stuff that came together really that pointed us towards that initiative it's just one example though again a lot of it is community driven is there interest in something that no one's being able to address by one discipline alone for these larger programs but within divisions I think it's a lot easier to handle even across a single directorate so because of the way we operate we're more familiar with each other but I mean it's a great question and I think infuse is a good example of the community really making a strong case from water sustainability climate of how important this topic was that we have to add components to it we had strong advocates across the foundation for that you know most of these cross foundational initiatives tend to be five years and so it's really driven by the budget senior leadership makes ultimately the decisions but at the programmatic level there's a lot of advocates saying this is important and here's why and we look to as I indicated reports from the community saying you know this really question needs to be addressed I just want to highlight the raise mechanism because one of the cases we made for that that was from the inspire pilot which many of you might know about well the working group we made a case saying look there's we need a place for these really out of the box ideas but don't co-review well right one panel loves it the other doesn't but there's something really neat here and so that really came from that saying look at all these examples that we have and a lot of the things that we fund through that had actually gone through panel review where the program director plucked it out and said no we must do this so we have quite a toolbox and we're pretty creative I would say across the foundation at trying to support the best ideas with the limited funds that we do have but brandy's right we have to correct the core and then at the same time we have to make room for these cross foundational initiatives so it's not a simple answer to your to your question you had an additional component that she just touched on about the review process for such of these so we have these larger initiatives we often you know we have requirements and the solicitations but we also give a lot of extra instruction to our reviewers as well right because they're also going through these growing pains of like trying to look at these large interdisciplinary or convergent topics it's not easy walking in being a disciplinary expert in one piece and looking at something that you're not really an expert in and having to evaluate that and so what is your value as a reviewer and what can you contribute it's it's the same on the reviewer in this well do others have comments oh yeah Kendra well I was just going to say one more thing about um co-review that the question touched on who I can't see who asked that but we have done a lot of study on are we hurting proposals by sending them for uh co-review and getting at this idea certainly as a PI I thought co-review is the kiss of death you know that's twice as many people to hate my proposal and you know this is just it's it's been a harder to proposal to co-review it um we've actually published a paper on this so this is public information that at least um in DEB program that when we do choose to send a proposal for co-review it has a slight I don't believe it's statistically significant higher chance of getting funded um then then not so if the content is there and the other program agrees that the content there's something like a little bit more interesting about those proposals in general or or the buy-in from the second program somehow helping um so just to kind of demystify that process because it's not a PI decision right so a lot of you know PI's never knew that their proposal was being co-reviewed and they say things like I would have written it differently if I knew it was going for co-review um but just to to let you know that the data don't support that idea yeah I would just concur with that we also had concerns about from PI's about the double jeopardy issue and the data did not seem to suggest that in fact some of our sister programs for example OCE they typically run panels whereas in AGS it's unsolicited we're in the traditional mode to which everybody is now trying to emulate in the beginning it was like why is AGS the only one that's the outlier but now with the proposal pressure because of the deadlines you know people are attending to move away and so we would have our program manager colleagues in OCE say well this one if it was out of sync you know with the panel review they would say well we'll just go by the merit the ad hoc review so I think it's the it's when the program directors are sensitive to those kind of issues then they bend over backwards to ameliorate it and so our data did not support that projects that were core-reviewed had less success rate did others have comments on that before I move on just very briefly that's the same as true for ocean sciences I think just the flip side of some of these concerns is that core-review co-funding is leveraging and there are a lot of other places in the foundation co-funding opportunities through EPSCOR or through International and these help to often raise proposals that might not be at the top level to things that are actually funded but that the program can invest in because it becomes easier if I was going to follow up I wanted to say that I think I'm hearing which is a common thing I've heard is the stove piping thing that we work in an earth not in a division and we try to put a proposal that has maybe some biology and some hydrology and something else and there's a sense that either isn't a niche or where it gets in there it gets poorly reviewed and I hear you collectively saying you don't think that's actually the case. The data don't fair that out in any of our decisions. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that the same experiences through EAR we did the same analysis and it doesn't show the flip side of that is that many of these special programs are enormously over subscribed and the success rates and some of those because you're taking what would have been dispersed among many different programs and you're saying we're going to only spend this much money on it across the foundation and so actually the investment potentially is smaller when you focus in on a single so it's just the flip side of this argument that we need a special program for special ideas. Thank you. If there are burning coal questions on the same topic we can go for it but I have comments from Don and Leho and Shemin that have been waiting for a while so if you feel altered. Okay let's go with Don. Yeah I wanted to these are questions maybe more for Brandi and Jessica and Kendra but if you could follow up a little bit on the international collaborations and talk about what you think it's really worked well and what some of the big challenges are. You go first. So some of the big challenges that we're seeing more and more is open access of data. Not all countries have the same philosophy or practices and I think that yesterday's panel and the work that EarthCube is doing is really I would urge the community to you know you're on the forefront of some of these issues and to explore how we break down barriers internationally. We spend a lot of time on our international agreements on that aspect. Certainly when we work with a country when we have similar merit review and so that's pretty much straightforward so there's a reason we do a lot with the UK but in terms of the UK the UKRI has now reorganized to hopefully facilitate but with that said though we share similarities in terms of how we review. We have lead agency agreements which Brandy can certainly talk to and so what that allows us to do talk about double jeopardy is that we've heard from the international community is that having both proposals submitted twice so maybe we'll fund it on our side but the international partner won't that becomes complicated so with a lead agency model what we do is we decide with our counterparts okay this particular proposal will it go through the NSF review process or in the case of the UK the UK process. With Israel they've actually deferred to our merit review system and so they said if this proposal goes through merit review and is selected we will fund the Israeli side and so those work quite well but you can't do that with every country one we need interest from the community we get countries all the time who want to have a lead agency agreement with NSF and then when we do our analytics and we see well we only have about 15-20 active proposals with that particular country so that's one thing I would say is the merit review and then the data access. Yeah so the data access is also one of the things that can be enhanced with them too depending on what you're doing as well and the other thing that I'd really like for the shout out too because this came up pretty heavily in the recent SIT solicitation associated with infrastructure and the sharing of infrastructure in different sites in different countries and allowing access across those for research that just would not have happened if we didn't have this international collaboration and one thing she didn't mention as well so when we are setting up these international collaborations yes there needs to be interest but at the same time it's somewhat of a bandwidth issue I am unique in my division for this I've been around for a while so I know how to do this but it's literally me tracking everybody's program at the same time for multiple countries the SIT solicitation was specific they all came to me so I didn't have to base anyone down so there are some downsides to some of this international activity and it's not a lack of your office or my office other than a lack of manpower I mean we just don't have the staff to cover this and they are intricate particularly when you had shared review processes you really have to be on top of stuff the Chinese one that's actually a lot less impactful on my time because they do their review process they do mine and then we come together and we decided were there ones that came to the top and both it's much easier to handle but at the same time it's a lot less I would almost say diplomacy in that case because we aren't working together strongly and all these are different they all have different sets of rules but all the ones we have have been extremely beneficial and they are worth the effort the key is do you have the people that actually help run them and I think that might actually be some of our biggest limitation in some of these Kendra did you have a comment people are waving at the screen I was just going to add just to amplify that it is worth it for some programs it's not an accident that dimensions of biodiversity in DEB was the program that we went after an international partnership with Brazil which contains most of the world's biodiversity and China and South Africa so we really chose those partner countries and added them kind of sequentially as their scientists and their funding agencies kind of got to a level where we could work together and trust the process but we do have a lead on dimensions of biodiversity I just want to kind of remind us that think about which nations which programs where is it important to invest this precious time that Brandy and Jessica were talking about I would just like to echo dimensions of biodiversity is an example really of a thoughtful international collaboration we often look to that one in terms of models for moving forward how we do this we've been doing this for quite a lot of time so we always are looking what's worked well and why and then will this work in this country and why we spend a lot of time with the lawyers at NSF going through these agreements we like to as much as possible streamline that process get language that fits these are NSF values this is what we do and then we transfer those across but I do think that dimensions of biodiversity how it was approached it was very thoughtful it added countries slowly it looked around the world and looked at how those countries ran their programs as well thank you since we are on the topic of international I would like to also let the committee know that out of the geosciences front office we have an international program as well we have an international program manager her name is Maria Yul and she works with other funding agencies in the so called Belmont forum and so every year they meet and they come up with a topic that is high priority based on what's happening in the various countries and then once they decide on that topic the countries that would like to put in monies towards solicitation do so so it's at your own what should I say and then they will run the solicitation and so there are these projects that are being run out of Belmont forum as well in addition to the UK NERC partnership we have or the BSF NSF partnership recently AGS became a member of that one so in addition to all that that's being run out in coordination with international we do have this Belmont forum as well so I'm not sure whether there are projects of science that's interested in that there have been there have been certainly an atmospheric and geospatial thanks Leho had a question thank you all this is incredibly enlightening this question is primarily I guess for Brandi, Jessica and Kendra so with respect to with respect to these sort of large scale programs it goes back a little bit to Bill's comments and questions you know I've heard it mentioned as well that you know five years is kind of the is the typical duration primarily driven by budget cycles and having sort of seen water sustainability climate infuse and sort of some of the comments we got from the community the sense is that often times with infuse for instance I think that there were maybe three or four solicitations over that five year period and your things are sort of just beginning to sort of get ripe and people are psyched about the topic and then it sort of moves on to something else and so could you all address whether they're whether that's something that you potentially hear from PIs in other and other directorates and what are the mechanisms or what are some potential mechanisms that might allow for something to have a longer duration without sort of having to spend something into sort of something new we hear about well infuse is the new C's and SAS is the new infuse but that's often not the best mental model I mean are there mechanisms for creating these longer term partnerships that get turned into something that is maybe ten or fifteen years in duration so I I'll address a little bit of it from the aspect of infuse I'm actually the keeper of the infuse portfolio at NSF and that doesn't just include things that are tagged as infuse any of you that have worked in data analytics across NSF know that if someone asks you a question on what research are you doing in this that's a loaded question because you have to search the entire foundation because it can show up anywhere I don't have official numbers for this but just to let you know every year that we've had infuse we have roughly I think seventy-five million that we can tag to it on top of that there's close to an extra hundred million that is showing up in some of the core programs the reason is the community starts to shift and look at these ideas which is the whole purpose of these initiatives right we want to make the mainstream so even though our programs and they aren't actually ending now I know you're worried about like this continuity of these groups obviously these projects are longer longer term I don't think anything at NSF is permanent except potentially long-term ecological projects although I could be mistaken in that we do have some mechanisms typically they the ones that I've been involved in have been on building networks so infuse of course this last round of solicitation we had the RCN addition to them right because we want the community to take over on this and take it in new directions and of course those are going to go out five years beyond the end of the initiative other mechanisms are a little bit less clear so for instance if I wanted to do a continuation on a project that I'm managing in my core program which by the way I don't have one so I don't get this option I actually can do that with the approval of my division director if I want to put money on it but again I just told you a major limitation to that I have to have a core program budget the same goes for things like supplements to add on to them often you have to pull money from other areas if you can there are options they're limited but again we do like our new initiatives to absorb some of the tenets of the old because we know that there's pieces that aren't done so one program that has sustained is C&H right so I think that's something to look at and that's the community now and that's an established program that started from one of these five-year initiatives and it has continued I think Brandy's point is well taken in that the community does start going to the core programs you know I said on the raised working group and we would wait all these proposals that come in so data shows that of every ten inquiries that come in say there's no place at NSF for us we need to submit a raise only one is actually submitted I have been amazed at how many co-funding ways you can do things at NSF and so a lot of times we get these proposals we go back to the program directors and they say actually they can submit to my program and co-review here so I think there's sometimes maybe the community doesn't realize how much you can do through the core programs and so I appreciate your point and what you're saying and we hear that a lot and it does concern us because you're building a community and then you're sort of taking away their funding we try as much as possible to keep the ones going that really have a long-term needs and then as much as possible we start moving it to the core programs and they have evolved and they have they're different because of these cost foundational activities I think that's a really useful perspective I think that that is maybe something for the committee to take stock of that these are sort of drivers of innovation in the core programs rather than the core programs themselves being sort of static yeah we review core programs every year they're constantly evolving so and there is a hybrid model that one of the reasons I said at the beginning and that the P2C2 program and the geo-prisons program fit in the core program is that it is the core programs who are making these decisions and the core programs who are generating the ideas I'm looking over and Wade here because she's our primary representative partner in EAR for the core programs program and so it is embedded in the core programs and the core programs are in the position to decide when it is when the ideas are mainstreamed there's another program in ocean sciences it was an interdisciplinary program called the ridge program or R2K and that one reached a point about 10 years ago now where we decided based on where the community was that they were ready to be mainstreamed and come into the core programs and that community continues to submit proposals and do good interdisciplinary science so that is another model I'd like to add on one more point to this discussion which is that you know whenever we have the initiative there will be a working group that will set the criteria set the ground rules to working and the cultures are so different across the different directorates and they come to some understanding and sometimes there may even be proposals that were at the borderline at the cutoff thing that the core programs then have stepped up and said well I see that one and maybe when you said hybrid model I thought you were going to talking about that so there will be some funding from they'll cobble together a coalition of funding and then set that project at perhaps a reduced level or whatever so I've seen that happen as well and so that's how innovation is sort of changes so I'd like to think of it as like a random walk like you know so you're really moving the science and engineering in small steps and so the core programs are not where they were they've also changed we can see that if we do the data analytics okay we've got you've got Shemin well first of all it's good to hear from all three divisions about the positive aspects of co-review and co-funding and I think the PIs somehow and if some PIs have the perception that co-funding co-program, co-review is challenging and it's a bit advantageous for them and so maybe NSF has some outreach to do to demystify or create the misconceptions that's it I do have a specific question for Anjali I wonder what your thoughts about potential opportunities for partnership between AGS and EAR you did mention hydro-mediology and hydro-climate already have some I think collaborations and that's probably through more co-review and co-fund and car and again I feel like in thoughts on formal partnership in the future on topics between the divisions or between programs within the two divisions some of the issues on mesoscale and smaller scales and sort of spatial temporal time scales sort of interest to both hydrological sciences and let's say dynamic metrology, carbon exchange evapotranspiration issues so there is a lot going on it's actually one of the barriers was one of the questions and the barriers are actually relationship building I think we love and Tom Torgerson was there he was going out of his way and we were working a lot for formal so coming back to your question how do these things get formalized there needs to be a buy-in from both the divisions that the work that is going to be proposed under the new rubric is beyond what's already happening otherwise you know there's a bandwidth issue like program directors are working on they are assigned their core program but they also take on additional duties and willingly because it's we're actually serving the community most of the program directors look at their job and their community and the science that they represent so it's a question of finding a niche where it would benefit and I thought that some of the work that was being done at NCAR through the community earth system modeling might have taken us a little further than it did we actually funded the inspire proposal Tom Torgerson and I on this matter and so the KUAA CPIs were going to be working and taking the hydrological modeling insights they had gained and then take it and embed it in the model perhaps it's not as easy there are some challenges on that front because of the multi-scale interactions and all that need to be sorted out but yeah that's that's an area that I think that at least slow moving if not in terms of imposing an initiative per se we should have a healthier interaction I think because it's already been identified at the core and maybe it could do with some kind of I'm not sure how to engage the those PIs who are involved in these issues with community earth system modeling or even field campaigns if there were some joint field campaigns we have a lot of field campaigns with OCE on this matter on the matter of climate but I haven't seen that much maybe the monsoons the North American monsoons there are some PIs that we co-funded career PI in fact I think but there may be some opportunities there that we could actually push the science forward as well as push our communities to meet so I'm not sure whether workshop is the way to do it or what might be the way to engage I'm I'm a little low to be a little prescriptive and top down because I think I firmly believe actually I don't think but I firmly believe that there's more intelligence outside the battery than there is within thank you so I think that the good ideas and everything has to come from outside and we have to facilitate quick response and then we have less than 15 minutes and I've got four people with questions lined up get more the point is to hear from the panel there is something you'd like to say I would say it's it's a science driven thing so for example if a science question demands interaction that's when it happens so for example you triggered me with the monsoon issue right well there's continental drilling lake drilling that feeds into monsoon ocean drilling right so the natural collaboration between EAR and OCE so we define it based on science and our system approach that's when you're going to sort of drive that interaction so next we have Doug if your question has not already been asked I think most of mine was answered actually through Layla's question I guess the only question I had and this is in the direction of collaborations driving to major new initiatives is speed and timeliness of actually doing that how can you do that at a speed that is responsive to the urgency of the question that's budget dependent in some cases yeah but you hit on a really good point I think we're pretty expedient and practical so if there's something out there that we think wow this needs to get funded we'll do it now if you're talking about a bigger program that takes time and resources so it just depends on the scale of what we're talking about and I guess that's where I was going is where do you take a fledgling idea or project and what is the momentum required for that to become a major program of record and just place something else a lot of work at the program level I think Terry's point science drives it and so we will make the case and we will start working across the directorates to do that and we'll bump it up the food chain and say here here this is what we need to do and look at this report and look at that report and so there's a lot of work and planning that gets that and I would say that most of us who've worked on these big initiatives know that it has a shelf life and so you do start thinking one to two years out well what next and what do we do and you know will it go away or can we keep trying but budget realities and the budget process as you know is not you know our fiscal year starts October 1st it's rare that we know what our budget is until the spring I mean we that's the reality of what we work in for these big big initiatives we start planning years a couple years in advance right because we have to submit the budget and the request so sometimes if we can do it through co-funding we will do it yeah and you make another good point sort of buried in there but sometimes without new money something has to go right and that's people don't want to give up what they have so that's a real challenge in trying to make room for some of these new things in the absence of new money which you know we're flat as the new doubling that's what we see so we're lucky to have flat budgets okay Bill had a question about his cart is down now okay Andrea thank you thanks I just wanted to revisit a comment that Candace made earlier when you were talking about some of the joint funded programs with EAR like Geo Prisons and T2C2 that are kind of scheduled to come to the end of their term soon so what piqued my interest was that you said those programs would be assessed and I wanted to maybe press you a bit on the specifics of how does that assessment process work when you're deciding whether to sunset continue or modify a program and anticipating perhaps part of your response if part of that is community input can you be specific you know how are you getting that community input for that so that's a work in progress but I can tell you what happened the last time and it was actually before I was at NSF but there was a blue ribbon panel assessed at the end of ESH which was Earth System History that was the precursor to P2C2 and there was an evaluation of the science outputs the in particular the synergy of across the the stove pipes and whether an evaluation of the value added of having a single review process versus something that was distributed around NSF so that was one example and we expected that there will be something similar coming up in the next year or so that will bring community members together will be very important to have that input and it will also be very important to well really essential to look at the themes of P2C2 which I had on a slide that wasn't really important anybody can look at the solicitation and say well this was 12 years ago when we came up with this it's a little long in the tooth now and if we're going to proceed with another incarnation of this program we'd like to make sure it's addressing the problems and issues that are current Carolina thinking about the budgetary issues the needs for infrastructure permanent perhaps infrastructure it seems like international ways of collaboration are really important for things that should be observatories right and thinking of that are there efforts to try to partner with bigger scale things like the European Research Council which offers huge grants to both PIs and Synergetic and I'm not aware that there are NSF collaborations or if they're in the works but that seems like they grant their scale sort of partnerships might be useful thinking in the future. Yeah that's an excellent point so as I mentioned I spent nine months in the Mathematical Physical Sciences working on their large facilities this is something I was interested in I had managed our chili portfolio where we have the largest investments that NSF has is in chili with the observatories the astronomy observatories I would say and I would urge the community and EAR to really learn from MPS and what they've done they've been very you know those observatories are very very large investments and how they have done that I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned from EAR and how to do that I'll let my colleagues in the EAR speak a little bit about the facilities and some of the interactions I know there have been we have worked on some of them but nothing to the scale of what MPS has done with the observatories I would just add too an example of ocean drilling you know a decades long program international flight where we exist NSF has one vessel at J.R. there are other vessels that are joined in with Europeans and join other countries they are consortia so another wonderful model of how we come together to solve a science problem it's an earth system problem but not just drilling in U.S. waters for ocean discovery we're trying to solve the global problems and so a long history of success there yes we've been interacting quite a bit with the EU and the ERC and there's you know with their Horizon 2020 and looking forward that has not been a linear conversation because there's different differences in terms of how we approach that that has I can say yes but it has taken a lot of conversation in terms of how do we implement this and it's not straightforward. I finally got the signal that she has been waving at me thank you okay so two examples isn't the ERC who co-funds the career some postdoc fellows to spend time with the ERC so the ERC actually invites career awardees and postdoctoral fellows that ERR has a postdoctoral fellowship program to spend time in their research programs they pay the expenses in Europe which we just have to get them there so I think that's a good start and we have had conversations with people from ERC in how they select their topics for some of their larger programs and when is the right time for NSF to partner so that's an ongoing conversation thank you question from Bill this is actually picking up on something Carolina said I realized this flat funding that's the new double and when one starts thinking ambitiously about programs we also know of this mid range instrumentation program is it fair to think of that as external to your core and so that's actually if we can design ideas that could compete in that as a plus is that the right way to think about that I was actually thinking of we talked about leveraging with international we talked about various divisions and directors and we didn't talk about office of integrated activities where the science and technology centers reside and so when one of our PIs submits winning science and tech proposal it's a huge boost for the field because it's like coming from OIA and the scientific oversight is by perhaps co-manage with the person at OIA and similarly for the mid scale infrastructure that's currently taking place so the successful projects are being worked out and they'll be announced I guess at the end of summer or whatever so that's a huge boost that's coming from OIA so that's leveraging OIA funds and so we always encourage our PIs to go for some of that money as appropriate just some of the parallel is it right to characterize the sort of programs that lies separately from the core program is commonly having the characteristic of being bigger in terms of cost projects is that not the case is it necessarily yes there is this perception that everything that needs to be done cross-directorate cost division needs to be big and I've been one of the few people who says that when you're starting something it doesn't necessarily need to be big you know and you could do high risk, high impact and it could be modest in size yeah it just depends on the topic and what it is and have we identified the bottleneck that is it could be in one of the disciplines but it could be interdisciplinary but the main thing could be here so identifying that and picking the diamond from all those interdisciplinary proposals that's the challenge but I do not necessarily think but yes they tend to be larger they tend to be larger okay and we are can so a lot of the a lot of the new cross-cutting initiatives have kind of two tracks you know if you see the solicitations but like Candice was saying sometimes the community has to be ready sometimes it can get ready sometimes you want to help the community get ready for some of these larger more imaginative types of projects and so I think the model is becoming having kind of a planning grant track or some kind of smaller award size that gets the group together and he does some of the initial thinking necessary to go a lot around a winning project or a winning idea a winning topic so I've seen that two track model is increasingly common I think for some of these harder science targets to reach. Thank you and with our one minute left I would just want to know if there are any burning real quick like a couple words responses to what can our committee do to lower barriers or any of the perceived and or real barriers that you have faced in developing these collaborations if there is a single word or something to ponder and we can discuss over lunch. I would just go back communication is so important we think of like this myth about co-review funding which means we need to sort of say it every single year and every single I know various newsletters those are the kinds of things where we sort of just need to do the constant targeting problem you can't say it too often and those are the kind of things that are really helpful. I would say that I look forward to the report in terms of what the next what you as experts in the field prioritize and then we would be seeing whether some of those priorities align with our own priorities and that would be an initial place to begin moving forward so I look forward to seeing your prioritized list rather than just sort of sort of a laundry list or shopping list. I just want to say that I feel like we could have taken much more time than we had certainly for the ocean science side we had lots of points that could have been made about each one of these questions so I think I will speak for myself I would be happy to follow up if the committee has any questions on anything that we didn't touch on. Thank you so much and so with that I would really want to thank all the panelists and everyone for your questions and this is really just incredibly illuminating for all of us I think and would like to invite you I guess to have a lunch with us and turn it over Bill to say bye and thank you I want to thank the panel too it was very interesting and brought back memories of the time I spent in NSF and even some good memories and we're going to reconvene promptly at 115 still an open session and as was mentioned you're welcome to join us for lunch if you've got dietary restrictions Remy where'd he go he used to be right there he's behind me he's got some meal tickets you're free to use those in the cafeteria and I think that's all I need to say the cafeteria is on the third floor if you wish to buy your own lunch the cafeteria is open so you can do that as well if you guys want to grab lunch and take it upstairs to the third floor so that you could get some light you can do that too thank you we are adjourned until 115 we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we are adjourned we also have just a lot of interaction between our scientists and the the academic community that is of course the the heart of what what NSF is about and so the opportunity to participate and be part of some of these coordinated efforts like like the Southern California Earthquake Center or geoprisms or of course Earthscope and these incredible investments that were made through that so anyway I just I think there's a number of different ways that we we find both at an interagency level as well as at a scientist scientist level to keep that coordination going the USGS has a number of different missions so in addition to our hazards we also have a fair amount of interaction between our water mission area and EAR core science systems is where we have our sort of funding foundational mapping capabilities including geologic mapping as well as geospatial geospatial land resources includes the Landsat satellite that we have jointly do with our good friends at NASA energy and minerals mission area and then probably to a lesser extent but with some some interactions I think with the AR and the realm of ecosystems and certainly with environmental health as we look at what are the impacts from both to to to wildlife as well as to as to humans. So I think across these missions we have a lot of ways that we we touch on it but I don't think there's a single part of what we do in hazards that that doesn't have interaction. We work on a lot of different hazards and USGS are just as sort of a little context here. We've got the primary responsibility for for monitoring and assessments for earthquakes volcanoes and landslides but then the capabilities that we bring are in many cases where the eyes and ears for Noah and their responsibilities so the same seismic networks that both USGS and NSF have invested in feed directly into Noah's tsunami warning centers we maintain over 8000 stream gauges that's absolutely critical for Noah's ability to do warnings for severe weather same thing with coastal coastal inundation storm surge. Our coastal and marine geology programs we're we're working on the geologic aspects of both the coast and the offshore and that then feeds into for example understanding barrier island impacts where you're going to have evacuation issues where you have breaches and whatnot. Space weather is I don't think part of the ARS portfolio but we have a key component of that with the ground based observatories and significance there for both geomagnetic storms when our sun turns unfriendly as well as more recently that's been quite a bit of engagement on the issue of electromagnetic poles and one one related interaction is been the support NSF is provided through our scope for the magnitude luric surveys and we actually have in our budget request to try to continue that and carry that forward as part of that EMP effort. And then we also are the we have sort of the CDC for wildlife the National Wildlife Health Center and of course then the geospatial data that underpins everything. So you heard I'm responsible for the natural hazards mission area. So these are the six programs you'll recognize in particular GSN is is is a joint essentially a joint program with with funding from both USGS and NSF. And then with this sort of broader responsibility across all the hazard work the survey does and in particular working a lot these days in the sort of the space of risk. So we take the hazard information we try to make that as real as possible whether through scenarios or through other kinds of products that can can make this meaningful. And pretty much everything that we do it is that foundation of observations and then the expertise developed by our scientists. That is what enables us to then deliver these societally relevant products the long term hazard assessments and then that rapid situational awareness and sort of real time capabilities. All of it enabled by communication. So I think one of the strongest and most long standing partnerships has been in the area of earthquakes and we have a statutory connection here. The since 1977 the National earthquake hazard reduction program with NSF the USGS the National Institute of Standards Technology and FEMA. Both EAR and engineering and to a certain extent social behavioral have all been part of that from the NSF side of things. And what Neher really does is it I think that I use the seismic hazard maps here as the example of what I see is the heart of Neher which is taking those fundamental advances whether in in in geoscience or in engineering and having a mechanism to turn that into something that society can directly apply. And so the hazard map is essentially everything we know everything we understand about earthquake hazards whether it is research that's been done in geodesy and paleo seismology the seismic data geologic mapping all of these different pieces are coming together into something that then is feeds into seismic provisions and ultimately model building codes that then applied to a trillion dollars worth of new construction every year. So that's a great outlet for fundamental science being brought to bear in society. GSN is is pretty much your poster child for good government right this is one network capability that's implemented in partnership with with Iris and UC San Diego it's one network that supports NSF's fundamental science mission. It supports the USGS mission for you know locating characterizing earthquakes and then being able to do assessments it supports Noah's mission for tsunami warning and it's a secondary network for nuclear test then monitoring. So it is it is been capitalized through DOE it's funded both USGS and NSF again Noah is a key partner in this it's it fits in all of our mission space and we are rather than everybody go off and build their own networks we have one network that meets all of those different needs and so it's I think a just just a great example of way at why these partnerships make sense to each of our mission. And then in the volcano arena just highlight the National Volcano Early Warning System we just got Congress congressional authorization for end views and I think it it's a it's a nice example of a framing mechanism for how do we prioritize and focus. Whether it is it is research or monitoring or assessment activities related to volcanoes how do we prioritize that based on the threat to society both the you know proximal hazards in the case of of Kilauea as it demonstrated so magnificently this past year. As well as the threat to aviation but then that within that framework then are essentially the sort of guideposts for where sort of those foundational research and monitoring efforts how those again link in to what is going to have the biggest impact for society. And then thinking now we have a number of these really important longstanding partnerships and I've mentioned a couple of those. I think one of the areas that is a real opportunity going forward is in the realm of Subduction Zone Science and I know this is something that there's also been a lot of interest from the academic community. We put together a plan from our standpoint to help sort of focus what our piece of this is where we're our our greatest needs and interests lie. And then we've been involved in active dialogue with our NSF counterparts as they build the I'm going to forget the name the research coordination networks and other mechanisms of bringing the community together. These are the biggest baddest geologic hazards that face us on the planet and we have so much left to understand both foundational understanding but then to to apply and use that. So I think this is an area arena for real opportunity both for EAR as well as for building partnerships with OCE and then with a number of other agencies including our good friends at NASA. We all have something to contribute to this arena. So I will I'll end my just sort of opening comments with with with that. I think we have as I said lots of good examples where we're we have we have co benefits from investments. And again NSF is able to make investments will never be able to make from the standpoint of the survey but we do provide that sort of societal impact avenue that I think is is valuable. So thank you again. Thank you very much. Mary. So I'll start off. Yeah. Sorry. Both of them. Just by telling you a little bit about my program and where I sit in NASA. I'm the head of the astrobiology program which is not alien autopsies and it's not. Yeah. Sorry. No. But is actually trying to understand the origin evolution of life on earth the context of first how did we form and evolve a planet that could actually support life or that could provide the environments that could allow for all the reactions and the steps that were required for life to emerge and then be sustained here on the planet. And we use everything that we know. I mean we fundamentally in our earth science because we're trying to understand everything about the earth then to project it to other bodies in our own solar system. And now we've discovered the billions and billions of exoplanets and many of those are going to be like earth in terms of being able to support life. We're now mapping it on to those planets as well. It's a discipline that brings together chemistry, geology, geophysics. We have to understand how planets work. And so as I look at I just decided because the organization of NSF sometimes is confusing. I just looked up what was in EAR because we work with people in ocean sciences of course and in polar science. But every single disciplinary program you have in there we have some sort of connection with and we work most closely with program officers. Or our own PIs to let us know what kind of programs are going on at NSF and ways that we might be able to collaborate. So scientifically we're interested in very similar sorts of questions. How does the earth function? What was the earth like during the Archaean and the Archaean? So many of the paleo programs that NSF has we have PIs that we fund as well. And then geobiology and low-temperature geochemistry is really important to us. Some of the things again when I think about our relationship with NSF intellectually we answer similar questions. We're interested in analog research sites to understand the extremes of housing function on earth whether it's up in the mountain or down miles below the surface. We're interested in how the earth is plumbed because that's really important. And again these planetary processes that support life are really important to us. I would just like to throw out there as part of what we have experienced in trying to interact with NSF and any other agency as we all have slightly different perceived and real cultural differences. Some of us that are sitting before you have what people call or is known as mission agencies where sometimes some of the research we do is a little bit more applied in the case of my work in planetary sciences at NASA. It's not exactly that it's applied but we have very specific questions that we want to have answered. So when we go for projects we're looking for partners that want to answer those exact same questions or some aspect of it. I think that I mentioned that analog environments are important to us. Ongoing studies that have been supported by NSF in the long term are really important for us to get the history of the site and what we can learn as a site evolves. I think there's a lot to be shared in terms of technology development. We are the agency that makes pretty cool things to send very cool places and I have had experience at NSF with people who are interested in technology development programs and coming in with us. We have much larger budgets in that regard I think than NSF for technology development and so that's a really important partnership for us because while we have the desire to make many of the measurements that you in this room are making here on Earth we need to figure out the best way to do it someplace else and so we put a lot into developing those instruments and technologies but we also need to test them here. So I mentioned that there's sort of these cultural perceived and real differences. I also think that organizationally like I said I hear rumors about NSF being reorganized. It still looks pretty familiar to me but I thought I would check it anyway. We certainly reorganize ourselves in NASA and in fact one of the things that we're facing which I think NSF has as well in other agencies is as the science demands interdisciplinary research. How do you cross division, how do you cross the organizational structures, the funding streams to actually get the science that you need done and so we're looking into different ways to do that at our own agency and we often look to what NSF is doing. So successfully and unsuccessfully we're all trying to again overcome those barriers. I think you're probably here too that Congress pays attention to what we all fund. They're somehow really concerned that researchers might be double dipping and that we need to carve out our world very clearly and I mean I fund things that also NIH funds and how can that possibly be. And so that's one of the challenges that we in government agencies that both do the science and fund it need to consider and is the perception by those from outside that nuance and subtlety is not a strong point on those. Yeah, so for the people who I ultimately work for so let's just put it to say it that way. Let's see if there are other things I wanted to mention. I think that you know what you'll in all of the interactions that we've had again you would think since we are all one government that passing money around or funding things together would be easy. I noticed there's a question do we do we care about whether we have ownership. I think that at least in my agency there's a tremendous emphasis put on collaboration and partnerships and so owning it with someone else is something that's very positive for us. But the reality of getting that paid for and the funding to go where it needs to go is just a nightmare. I've been working on an interagency agreement with NSF that has gone on now for four months and I'm trying to give them a million dollars that should be easy. And again it all came from the same place to begin with. But these are things that that there is I think all of us would agree there's a will amongst agencies to make the right decisions about maximizing and leveraging the funding that we get from the government and from the American taxpayer to get the best science. To answer the questions we're all interested in. But there are these organizational and bizarre rule impediments that make it sometimes very difficult. So I will say so that for any of you that don't realize that you have my pitch for these come to my place for funding potentially. We at NASA even though we study other worlds and and our you know tasks with doing space exploration everything we know about everywhere else begins with what we learn about here on Earth. And so planetary sciences as well as my own specific program really rely heavily on the work that is funded and carried out by the scientists of EAR. So I think I'll stop there. Thank you very much Nancy. Okay. So do I pull up slide. Okay I have some slides. Yeah so I've worked actually with NSF quite a bit over the years and. Oh you had it and then it went away. So but I've never I haven't always paid attention to which division I was dealing with so I could have these things confused but I've tried to. I did look up and we both saw the screen division of Earth Sciences and Disciplinary Program section to look at that to figure it out. But anyway to just to note who NIFA is National Institute of Food and Agriculture. We have what this sort of new mission we say invest in an advanced agricultural research education and extension to solve societal challenges. But previously it was a little more clear I think to advance knowledge for agriculture the environment human health and well-being and community. So that brings back brings in the humans a little more explicitly in communities because we do it is it is just extremely interdisciplinary. There's aren't aren't very many disciplines that aren't encompassed in this. And so our budget is a lot smaller than NSF. But anyway and the focus is domestic but there are a lot of opportunities for global engagement. As long as there's some connection to somehow it'll help people here in the U.S. one way or another. And I'm really good at making that case for whatever you say. Anyway but I'm probably only going to be there at NIFA through September. So that's my contact information but James Dobrowalski will be sort of taking over most of my duties at least for the short term after the we move to Kansas City. So again to what we mean by agriculture et cetera is it's pretty much you can think of it as food and everything and fiber and everything connected to it. So it's not just cropped lands and animal production but forests and rangelands and everything that intersects them and that affects them. So interactions with human health and other systems, urban systems, biodiversity, land use, land management, water, hydrology all of that is encompassed in it.  And so overall the major goal is sustainability of whatever the system, the human system is. And so I think there's a lot going on at NSF with that word sustainability is the big word I guess for now. So the main program that we, the biggest program that we have at NIFA that funds, we basically fund research. We don't do our own research, that's agricultural research or this other agencies do that and we do basically the same function that NSF does. But what we do have in our legislative authority for our biggest program is not just research but research and education and extension. And I think that partnership with NIFA, with NSF, between NIFA and NSF does sort of help bring out more of that, those broader impacts. And I'll talk a little more about that later. It also is a lot of flexibility in the program. We have no year funding so it makes it a lot easier to deal with things. Okay, we have money in 2019, you have money in 2020. We can make it work, you know, because we can wait because we have no year funding. So, and the other thing we do have is most agencies I think have the ability to make grants for up to five years. We have up to 10 years, need a major review after five years, but up to 10 years the same grant. And so that might lend a little flexibility to when you partner with us as well. We used to have a rapid type program. It went away this year, it may be coming back or it may not be, but that's something that we have in the past collaborated on in the sense that, you know, okay, hurricane struck here. We'll fund this part because we only have a little bit of money and someone other agency will fund the other part and we'll put it all together and have a really big project to see what were the impacts of the hurricane Maria, for instance. But there are a lot of other programs besides the AFRI Agriculture and Food Research Initiative that also have the potential for partnering and for international work as well, because there was some talk about international. So, I just brought out this, we have a specific language in our AFRI RFA about global engagement. And so when we say, okay, we're domestically focused, well, like I said, we can make the case. And so in partnering with NSF, who doesn't necessarily have to have a domestic focus on all their research, we can still partner and do similar things and co-fund projects, and we have in the past done this. And here are some other opportunities that aren't the AFRI program that could possibly we could establish partnerships with, and we may actually have some partnerships with some of these. But the ones I've bolded I think are the ones that might be of most interest to EAR. So anyway, I won't read those. Some current and recent interagency joint calls we've had with NSF, Plant Biotic Interactions has been ongoing for the last several years, perhaps not as much of interest to EAR. Signals in the soil was already mentioned by Brandy, we've been partnering on that, and I think there's a lot of interest in EAR and that. Cyber, physical systems, competitive grants program, robotics, I'm not sure how interested you've been, robotics, innovations, infuse, we've been involved in that from the beginning. And the EGIRS, we have some specific areas where we partner with NSF on. There are a couple more listed there, but some of the other programs that kind of led into infuse, at least in my way of thinking that we partnered with NSF on water sustainability and climate and the ESOM program. That was mentioned I think by Anjali. And then there's some other programs, interagency partnerships that we deal with. As Don mentioned, I'm co-chair of the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group, and we have a lot of sort of things we do together within the agency. NSF participates, but they haven't ever participated in a joint call. But we have had joint calls every three years on Carbon Cycle with NASA, DOE, NOAA, and NSF sort of looks on from the side and sometimes helps to steer us this way or sort of unofficially sort of collaborate across some of their programs that fund similar things. There used to be more explicit things on Carbon Cycle in this program, NEAR, this was like in the OTS. Other interagency working groups that on modeling, integrative modeling that I participate in and that mental participation and water cycle, water resources or other areas that we like to partner in. And there are various other interagency groups, what I was thinking of the IARCIC and the things around our Arctic issues. And for us, we would be interested in land transitions, forest cover and forest tundra transitions and permafrost are sort of the two main areas that we would be able to partner with NSF on in this. I thought I'd say a little more about the AFRAI program and potential connections to EAR. That's not the way you say it. That's the way I've been saying it in my head. So it came out. Sorry. So we have, I guess, two main areas in our RFA. Under AFRAI, there's three RFA's, one of them is called foundational and applied. Within that, there's an area that Congress has defined as bioenergy, natural resources and environment. And we have defined these four priorities. They vary sometimes from year to year. But these are areas that I think also would be our right for partnering. And actually, if we partner with NSF, that's where the money is coming out of. What was assigned to that Benrey program and one of those four areas, maybe all of those four areas. And then there's also new under AFRAI, something that's, there's some similar programs at NSF on cyber infrastructure and tools. And within that, again, like the RCNs at NSF, we have, we sort of inverted the letters and we're calling coordinated innovation networks. So anyway, so those are programs that where we can partner some of the money allocated to AFRAI for some of these areas we can take out and partner with NSF on. And it's actually quite advantageous in some cases. I thought that the infuse, the ESOM and water sustainability and climate were particularly good win-win situations for both NFA and NSF. Another area that's fairly new last couple of years is we have this program called Sustainable Agricultural Systems. Again, emphasis on sustainability. And I think there's a lot about that in this division as well. And those are the sort of three main areas. They're written quite broadly and you can read a lot in them. But it's about sustaining agricultural systems, but not just production systems, but communities and the interactions with the natural systems and the managed systems. Some other ideas that I was just thinking about how the partnership can be very helpful. NSF has in all their proposals, I think in all of their proposals, they have this requirement for broader impacts, right? And yet the agency kind of is all about research and often there's not as much emphasis as some people would like going into the broader impact side of things. And generally one doesn't want to put a lot of money in their emphasis on the research, whereas we do broader impacts all the time. We integrate research, education and extension and outreach and all of that routinely with most of our programs. And so that can be a way that partnering could, through co-funding, and we do do co-funding oftentimes in these joint calls, we could fund the education part, the outreach part. And then that could sort of make things a little easier on the budgets on both sides and on our requirement to have a certain amount of our funds go to these other functions. Let's see, what else was I thinking? Oh, and then partnerships I think have brought in the land grant colleges and a lot of the programs there brought them more in tune with NSF because of these joint programs with other agencies as well. With NASA we've done joint programs and now a lot of our people are more interested in remote sensing as a result and vice versa. Remote sensors are more interested in looking at agriculture and so that's something that I think is a good thing. International, we have sort of through NSF partnered with IAI and with Belmont Forum and other areas that I think are of great interest. I think land use and land cover change is a major area that we have been focusing on and it's kind of dropped out of things.  So that was mainly what I think I kind of answered most of these questions or addressed them in some way or another. You know, limitations and gaps I think can be filled through partnerships in a very nice way and I've identified a few of those problems. I've found it works really well. We've figured out how to work together with NSF quite easily and know how to handle it. NIFA is moving to Kansas City, much reduction in staff, much reduction in staff. So partnering on programs could be an easier way for us to get our money out the door. So just think about that too. Anyway, that's all. Thank you. Gerald. Good afternoon. I appreciate the opportunity to speak in front of the board. Unfortunately, I don't have these slides with me. I just got back from two weeks in India and I did not have a chance to get everything approved. So if I start falling asleep near the end, just blame it on the 48 hour flight to get back with that. And fundamentally, NASA's Earth Science Division and EAR are very similar in how we approach things. What does EAR want to do? One's basically kind of understanding the fundamental science, the fundamental physics that drive a lot of processes. All the different missions that we launch into space and also our several orbital or airborne missions are all fundamentally trying to seek some sort of new parameter. Is it something that's driving earthquakes? How fast is the ice sheets moving? How fast are they melting? How does water move its way through the energy cycle? That's kind of the core of what drives NASA Science. We end up collecting a lot of data. We've got cost cap missions, which means that we cannot analyze the data. You've got a science community that's rich with ideas, rich with capabilities. And some of the experience that I have is basically from an NSF site, if it's remote sensing, then that's NASA's job to fund. And speed is kind of sometimes a little bit of an artificial barrier in between. I'll just say some of the capabilities because basically NASA's collecting a lot of data and I think a lot of it goes unused. So throughout my talk, I want to go ahead and kind of touch on some of these things and hopefully identify some opportunities coming up in the following years and potentially decades moving forward. So how does NASA come up with an idea for a mission? It's actually a good group of scientists say we would like to better understand. I'll pick on David Update. We just had the rich earthquakes. How, what drives the earthquake process? And so we need some sort of technology. So what I'm going to describe is basically that NASA, of course, were in the Earth Science Division and within it we've got a number of different, for the subdivide. Within research and analysis, this is where we actually come up with the idea, the scientific just. So that's kind of, I think the correct comparison with EAR is with NASA's research analysis. We come up with the ideas. The Earth Science and Technology Office, ESTO, is one that develops the technology.  And the search and technology comes up with a viable plan. The blueprints are handed over to flight and they actually build the satellite. There's a lot more interactions and connections within here. It gives kind of the female things. So flight builds it. Once it's built and launched, it's up and collecting data. It now comes back to the research analysis side. And this is where we go ahead and one fundamental research. This is through our ROSES solicitations, Research Opportunities and Earth Science. Basically, if you want a ROSES solicitation to come out on Valentine's Day every year. So ROSES and Valentine's Day, it's kind of the easy way of remembering. So Research Opportunities and Earth and Space Science. So that's when our solicitation comes out. And finally we go ahead and then fund the peer research, but we also have applications. So the Applied Science Program, how do we go ahead and make the data that we're collecting a little bit more societally relevant. And that's where that group comes in. And these are the groups, the Applied Science Program directly works with USDA, with USGS, with a lot of the agencies, especially NOAA, or basically there's an operational need for the data. We also work in the USGS for the science side. They've got scientists, but they also have an operational mandate. And what we do is basically try to collect data that can go ahead and help all agencies be able to move forward, but also the academic community. And so that kind of gives kind of a broad overview of basically how the missions come together. We start with a science question. We work our way through until we actually have a mission. It's launched and then we have the data that comes through. And it comes down to depending on what the mission is, is how much money we have for being able to go ahead and take that data that we're collecting to the next level. One of the satellites that I'm responsible for is a permission called NISAR, NASA ISRO, which is India's NASA. That's why it's over in India the last couple of weeks. Synthetic aperture radar. This one mission basically is going to become NASA's flagship mission. They're not a data in products we're going to collect in the first year.  We're talking about from Mercury to Pluto plus 40 years plus of Landsat on Earth. Three times that volume in the first year. This is, I'll say, a headache on our side basically. How do we work with it? But it's opportunities for the NSF community. And so what I want to do is break down this notion of basically, we know that sensing science is only funded by NASA. This is data that's being collected. NSF has got incredible in-situ networks. As does USGS. USDA has got soil moisture networks that we all take advantage of. And this is where I see when NISAR launches in 2022, we're going to have more data that we know what to do with. On picking a NISAR for a moment, we've got a solid piece to it. So satellite radar is very capable. With basically earthquakes, volcanoes, land subsidence, surface water hydrology. We have an ecosystem component. We're actually looking at global biomass. We're looking at disturbance change. We have a cryosphere piece where we're tracking all the ice sheets, as well as the global glaciers. We're also looking at sea ice. If you go to nisar.jpl.nasa.gov or just Google NASA NISAR, we've got over 20 white papers on the societal benefits that we go ahead and do with NISAR. So if you're into forestry, we've got a lot of different capabilities there. This is where we are leaning on our fellow agencies and also in academic research is basically, how do we go ahead and take this the next step further? This data volume that we're dealing with with NISAR, the Alaska satellite facility is going to be where the data is officially supposed to be held. But we found out the volume of data. If we downloaded a process of JPL and we tried to get up to Alaska, the pipeline between Alaska to the California is not big enough. So if we started transferring data, we would never catch up. And so we're actually going to be using the cloud. And with the cloud, you've got specific charges to get data in and out. And we're dealing with huge complex datasets. So we're working on developing tools in the cloud in which researchers could go ahead and come into the cloud. So it doesn't matter if it's a NASA researcher, an academic researcher, anybody with a Google account could go ahead and come in. So I see this as an opportunity of basically having additional partnerships. How can you go ahead and find somebody that's interested in working with some of the NISAR data or any other NASA datasets that will ultimately be moved into the cloud for being able to go ahead and allow processing time? And the other thing we're looking at basically by having tools in the cloud, both ones that basically NASA's developed, we're also going to have it so that other researchers, if they have codes, algorithms, they want to go ahead and put it in the cloud to basically be shared by the broader community, we'll enable them to go ahead and bring their tools into the cloud and work with the data. And if we actually find products that a lot of people really like, this is something we'll start considering. Well, is this something that we'd like to actually start doing on a global basis? And again, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is trying to get the data. All the photons, the NISAR clocks, we won't be able to get those out to the broadest community, both from the research perspective and also as my colleagues here within the panel and those who could not be on the panel. So we've got a lot of opportunities coming up. If I dive a little bit deeper with how NASA's interacted with EAR, one of the many hats I wear is I'm a program scientist within the Earth Service Interior Focus area. And with this, we do a lot of work with UNAFCO. It's an NSF-funded group within GAGE. And we actually pay UNAFCO in the order of about 1.1 million a year. UNAFCO operates, basically maintains our network of GNSS sites. We also have support WINSAR, which is the academic access to radar data that's not managed by NASA. It also enables a lot of other education outreach, all through UNAFCO. And the partnership that we've had with the UNAFCO has been wonderful. It's been mutually beneficiary, both by us providing extra resources to help UNAFCO move along. But we have a solid group of people that maintain our GNSS networks. And so I see that as, I'll say, at least from my perspective, case study of what has worked really well collaborating with NSF in this area. We have some areas that are coming up thanks to the Academy of Sciences. We have the Decadal Surveys. The Decadal Survey provides a roadmap for upcoming satellite missions for NASA and USGS, NOAA, on basically what are kind of the high priority missions that are coming up. You can see all of them are based in science, but there's also a societal benefit to each one of them. So I see there's a lot more opportunities for them, the NSF community, on helping develop these missions. Right now we have five different studies that are going on. One's for AACP, this is Atmosphere, aerosols, cloud and precipitation. And so this is actually a three-year study to be able to find out what is the best type of architecture to go in and address these concerns and moving forward. Another one is mass change, kind of a grace follow-on, follow-on, but we don't want to use the term follow-on with any of these missions because what we're really looking for is what's the next technology. We just don't want a carbon copy with just an incremental improvement. We're really looking for kind of new game-changing technology. Another one's called SPG, surface biology and geology. And so this is basically, it's going to be a hyperspectral, moderate-resolution satellite that will, and what exactly it looks like. We'll find out once the study's ultimately complete, but it'll likely be a history-like mission, but a lot more bells and whistles on it. The last one, when I'm responsible for surface deformation or change, I'm not using a follow-on nomenclature, but it will be a nice or like mission. This one, what the Academy actually recommended, was a mission that really focused on just surface deformation and land surface change. And so with radar, you've got something that will say phase, and then you've got the backscatter. The backscatter's like the radar albedo. Phase allows you to go ahead and measure very subtle. We're talking no need of changes from space to the land surface. And so SCC was supposed to be the only focus on the phase piece for deformation, but it had quarters with what it had and added on a backscatt