Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

Last November, President Obama announced National Lab Day, a nationwide movement to support STEM education. Although National Lab Day is a year-round activity, teachers and schools around the country will be organizing events on May 12th—so sign up now!

Policymakers in more than 25 Federal agencies and Departments are poised to get a mix of education and inspiration at an all-day session to be held later this week that will focus on the use of prizes and other incentives to generate solutions to pressing problems. The event, co-sponsored by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Case Foundation, is an outgrowth of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation, released in September.

Imagine you are a scientist whose research is funded by various Federal agencies, and imagine that not only does each of these agencies require an annual progress report—a reasonable requirement—but that each has its own complicated forms for doing so and its own system you must navigate in order to submit those forms. As Federal grantees know, this is the unfortunate situation today.

OSTP Director John Holdren was a keynote speaker yesterday at the National Academy of Engineering’s “Grand Challenges for the 21st Century” Summit held in Chicago.

OSTP received a large number of e-mails and attachments in response to our request for information on the “Grand Challenges of the 21st Century”—and unfortunately, our e-mail inbox overflowed. We are giving those whose message was returned a second chance to submit.

President Obama yesterday released the names of ten individuals whom he intends to appoint to the recently created Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. The ten will join the previously named chair and vice chair in exploring bioethical issues anticipated to emerge from advances in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology.

At the 2010 White House Egg Roll yesterday, preschoolers and students had the opportunity to learn some science, with the South Lawn of the White House as their laboratory setting.

Help us find out if Dr. Carl Wieman is the first science Nobelist named to a position in the Executive Office of the President.

In our technological world, technical standards are playing an increasingly important role as federal agencies tackle a range of pressing problems.

OSTP senior policy analyst Kate Moran just returned from Miami, where she helped greet the return of Research Vessel (R/V) Endeavor after its voyage to Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating January 12 earthquake.

Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released the National Broadband Plan, called for in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to identify ways to expand access to broadband and promote economic growth and job creation.

Recently, OSTP Director John Holdren was among a plethora of distinguished contributors to “Global Reset,” a special edition of SEED magazine.

During the transition to OSTP's new website, the RSS feed for our blog was lost. Well, it's back. If you wish to subscribe to the new OSTP Blog via RSS, please do so using http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/feed/blog/ostp

This most recent dispatch describes events surrounding the second in a series of Science Envoy missions to build bridges and partnerships with Muslim communities and seek common solutions to global challenges—fulfilling a promise President Obama made in his New Beginning speech in June in Cairo.