Building Stronger Bridges Between Discovery, Innovation, and Prosperity – Physics

Strengthening STEM pathways

Todays STEM students and researchers are the leaders and innovators of tomorrow. One of my key priorities is realizing the full potential of the American workforce. There is tremendous talent throughout our nation, but only a fraction of it becomes part of the broader STEM community.

US competitiveness depends on reaching that talent, because we need an agile and adaptable workforce that can upskill, reskill and succeed through creative and innovative mindsets. The need is perhaps more urgent now than ever as the pandemic has deeply impacted pathways to STEM education and careers.

As we work to spur recovery and provide relief, we are looking at how we can scale up the reach of the broader STEM community so that anyonefrom any background and from any part of the countrywho has the aspiration and talent to go into a STEM career is given the opportunity and provided the support to do so.

This will require strengthening pathways into STEM fields and expanding our reach into communities where talent exists. We are going to have to develop new approaches and tailor educational experiences for communities to be more effective at bringing talent into the STEM enterprise.

NSF is also working to develop a diverse workforce capable of driving the industries of the future. For example, we are currently on the cusp of a new quantum revolution and we need a well-trained workforce to accelerate it.

NSF has funded quantum research and education since the 1980s by providing support for thousands of graduate students, post-docs, and early career researchers. Now, the agency is finding new ways to train students in the flexible thinking needed to learn about quantum and to adopt education concepts that could have broad benefits across the country.

Through the National Q-12 Education Partnership, NSF has invested $1 million in linking top industry and academic leaders to build a better-trained, more diverse group of quantum learners, ready one day to enter the quantum workforce.

This effort includes investing in projects such as a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Chicago collaboration to create curricula and implement tools that will increase quantum awareness and literacy at the K-12 leveland ultimately for all age groups.

Another project, run by the American Association of Physics Teachers, will host summer workshops for teachers and build a community of educators working to deploy QIS-focused content at schools.

Seeding bold, large-scale foundational and transformative research with meaningful societal and economic impact

By seeding strategic investments, NSF steers the frontiers of discovery and innovation toward breakthroughs that address pressing societal challenges and that places the US at the vanguard of global leadership.

The global pandemic has dramatically underscored the importance and uniqueness of NSFs long-term support for foundational research coupled with use-inspired innovations across the entire spectrum of STEM fields.

NSF rapidly responded to the pandemic by deploying decades of discovery and innovations in support of researchers across all fields of science and engineering working to understand and combat the virus. The results ranged from new designs for vital personal protective equipment and testing devices more easily deployable in the field to new models that advanced our fundamental understanding of the viruss structure and how it functions, to name a few.

Additionally, NSFs early support for projects like CRISPR and the science that led to the creation of the technique polymerase chain reaction have enabled major advancements in our ability to understand the COVID-19 virus and the development of vaccines to slow its spread.

Years of NSF support for dark matter research even resulted in surprising outcomes that facilitated pandemic response efforts. When particle physicists working in Italy on NSF-supported dark matter research were forced to halt their work because of the global pandemic, they quickly shifted focus to look for solutions. Familiar with using and building sensitive detection equipment involving handling and pumping gases, it was a natural transition to adjust focus from the argon used in their dark matter detector to oxygen and lungs instead. Their quick work resulted in an FDA approved ventilator constructed from low cost and easily accessible materials.

These innovations began as exploratory-based research projects aimed at better understanding the world around us. They exemplify the potential benefits of science, technology and engineering solutions that are driven by the unbelievable power of curiosity-driven research.

In other words, NSF supports both fundamental explorations and use-inspired innovations that make possible technological progress and produces solutions to challenges facing society. This is because the scientific pursuit of knowledge and understanding cannot be separated from the development of new technological capabilities.

And, in turn, these new capabilities allow us to pursue new research questions that were once out of our reach, forming a virtuous cycle.

The DNA of NSF

It is this double helix of curiosity-driven, discovery-based explorations in synergy with use-inspired, solutions-focused innovations that makes up the DNA of NSF.

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Building Stronger Bridges Between Discovery, Innovation, and Prosperity - Physics