This week with NSF Director Panchanathan
NSF has been bustling with activity in recent weeks, achieving many significant milestones.
NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan welcomed Phoenix, Arizona Mayor Kate Gallego to NSF headquarters. Their discussions centered around collaboration opportunities with the Conference of Mayors, exploring how NSF's initiatives can align with and support local and regional priorities. This meeting highlighted the agency's dedication to engaging with municipal leaders to foster innovation and stimulate economic growth at the local level.
NSF continues to support innovative research and foster a diverse and inclusive scientific community through various initiatives. The agency recently announced a new round of the Expanding AI Innovation through Capacity Building and Partnerships awards to foster diversity and inclusion within the artificial intelligence research community. In collaboration with the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, USDA, United States Department of Defense and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NSF is supporting seven groundbreaking projects aimed at enhancing AI research and education at minority-serving institutions and historically Black colleges and universities.
NSF announced a $35 million award through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Research Incubators for STEM Excellence Research Infrastructure Improvement (E-RISE RII) to transform research capacity and competitiveness. E-RISE RII is channeling significant investments into Maine, Mississippi, South Dakota, New Mexico and Kentucky to build research capacity, create workforce development opportunities and enhance STEM research infrastructure.
NSF has begun construction on the Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF), a cutting-edge facility led by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin that will revolutionize computational research and development. LCCF is envisioned as a distributed computational facility to enable transformative discoveries for broad classes of curiosity-driven and use-inspired applications. The project includes a range of education and public outreach plans to grow the future science and engineering workforce.
These recent activities and announcements underscore NSF's pursuit of innovation, collaboration and inclusivity in the scientific community.