National Science Foundation

NSF would receive $4.47 billion dollars in FY2002, up $56.1 million (or 1.3 percent) from FY2001 under the President’s budget request. S&T highlights are:

• Math and Science Partnerships Initiative - $200 million new initiative, part of the President’s No Child Left Behind plan to strengthen and reform K-12 education. Partnerships between state and local school districts and institutions of higher education will provide students with enhanced opportunities to perform to high standards in math and science.
• Nanoscale Science and Engineering - $174 million (up 16 percent from last year) to explore phenomena at molecular and atomic scales and new techniques to facilitate a broad range of applications.
• Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) - $100 million same as FY 01 level.
• Science and Technology Centers - $26 million to initiate a new group of centers in topics across the range of disciplines supported by NSF.
• Centers and Networks of Excellence - $29.39 million to support four new research and education centers, a multidisciplinary, multi-sectoral network for modeling and simulation at the nanoscale.
• Innovation Partnerships - eliminated ($10 million in FY 2001).
• Interdisciplinary Mathematics - $20 million in new funding - to study the role of mathematics in advancing interdisciplinary science focusing on management of large data sets, modeling uncertainty, and prediction of complex non-linear systems.
• Biocomplexity in the Environment - $58 million (5.9 percent increase over FY 2001) to investigate interactions among ecological, social and physical earth systems.
• Information Technology Research - $273 million (a 5 percent increase over FY 01) to deepen research on software, networking, scalability, and communications to improve ways to gather, store, analyze, share and display information. Special emphasis on interface of IT and biological research to evoke new cyber-information infrastructure.
• Learning for the 21st Century - $126 million (3 percent over FY 2001) to explore the potential of information technology to facilitate and enhance learning. Seeks to transfer new knowledge about learning to materials, courses and curricula (for ex., digital libraries).
• Plant Genome Research Program -$65 million (maintained at FY 01 level) to support ongoing research on genomics of plants of major economic importance in order to understand the structure, organization and function of plant genomes important to agriculture, the environment, energy, and health.
• 2010 Project - $20 million (33 percent increase over FY 2001) completion of the genome of the mode plant Arabidopsis enabled researchers to begin a systematic effort to determine the functions of the 20,000 to 25,000 genes of this flowering plant and increase understanding the basic biological processes in all flowering plants and in creating better products for society.