SSTI Digest

Forty-four research universities in 28 states and the District of Columbia will receive $80 million from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to help address the challenges of the rapidly changing and increasingly interdisciplinary nature of undergraduate biology education. The grants will support programs that encourage graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to hone their teaching skills in undergraduate courses.

Other programs will bring emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics and computational biology into the undergraduate curriculum and encourage minorities to pursue careers in science.

The four-year grants range in size from $1.2 million to $2.2 million each. A panel of scientists and educators reviewed proposals from 189 institutions.

A study released by the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University in Boston is one of the more recent efforts to examine all aspects of U.S. states and their economies. Entitled State Competitiveness Report 2001, the study defines competitiveness as the ability to ensure and sustain a high level of per capita income and its continued growth.

The BHI report combines more than three dozen variables into nine subindexes: government and fiscal policy, institutions, infrastructure, human resources, technology, finance, openness, domestic competition and environmental policy. Using the nine subindexes, each of which represents an element of competitiveness, the authors made an overall index and ranked the states according to their overall competitiveness.

Among the study's key findings are:

Because knowledge-based services can be supplied anywhere across the world due to increased international investment in IT infrastructure, future U.S. competitiveness hinges on diversification and broadening of the technology-based manufacturing sector, according to NIST Senior Economist George Tassey.



Tassey's lastest report, R&D and Long-Term Competitiveness: Manufacturing's Central Role in a Knowledge-based Economy, lays out the critical role manufacturing and manufacturing R&D plays in the U.S. economy, presents the dire forecast for low-R&D intensive manufacturers, and presents a framework for analyzing federal R&D investment strategies consistent with a national innovation system.



Tassey also argues that the zeal or enthusiasm for information technology that dominated policy discussion during the past few years and overshadowed and "induced and unbalanced perspective" on the appropriate strategies to secure economic competitiveness.

President Bush has nominated Elias Zerhouni, executive vice dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as the new director of the National Institutes of Health.