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Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

  • Women in Science: A Discussion on the Diane Rehm Show

    Posted by Phil Larson on December 2, 2009 at 3:21 PM EDT

    Two of this year's American Nobel winners--Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California-San Francisco and Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University--were featured on WAMU's Diane Rehm show today, along with Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, to talk about the importance of attracting more girls and women into science, engineering, and math school programs and careers, and to discuss policy approaches to ensure that women can stay in those careers and rise through the ranks.

    The archived audio of the hour long conversation is available on the Diane Rehm Show website.

    Learn more about Education, Women

  • President Obama, Director Holdren Welcome Nobel Winners to The White House

    Posted by Phil Larson on December 1, 2009 at 6:36 PM EDT

    Keeping with presidential custom, President Obama and OSTP Director John P. Holdren received this year's American Nobel Prize winners in the Oval Office this afternoon, accompanied by the Ambassadors of Sweden and Norway.

    At a Blair House reception following the 30-minute meeting with the President, Dr. Holdren noted that fully 11 of this year's 13 winners are Americans and highlighted the Obama Administration's commitment to science, engineering, and mathematics education as a means of maintaining U.S. excellence in the sciences. Dr. Holdren has also noted that this year's American Nobel winners are prime examples of the great value the nation gains through its investments in basic research. The Nobelists' discoveries relating to cancer, inherited diseases, and optically based telecommunication technologies, among other advances, were attained in large part thanks to federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Energy Department.

    Also notable is the fact that three of the five women Nobel winners are Americans, including the first woman ever to win the economic sciences award.

  • Director Holdren Provides Introduction to MIT Journal on Energy and Climate

    Posted by Phil Larson on November 25, 2009 at 1:54 PM EDT

    OSTP Director John P. Holdren provides a comprehensive view of the energy and climate landscape in an invited Introduction to the fall special issue of Innovations, a quarterly journal of the MIT Press.

    In his introductory essay to the issue entitled Energy for Change, Creating Climate Solutions, Dr. Holdren commends the journal's collection of articles by esteemed scientists and thought-leaders as thorough a survey of energy and climate solutions as has yet been compiled.

    Of the climate challenge, he writes:

    Without energy, there is no economy. Without climate, there is no environment. Without economy and environment, there is no material well-being, no civil society, no personal or national security. The overriding problem associated with these realities, of course, is that the world has long been getting most of the energy its economies need from fossil fuels, whose emissions are imperiling the climate that its environment needs.

    The full text of Dr. Holdren's introduction to Innovations, Energy for Change, Creating Climate Solutions, can be found here.

  • A Phenomenal Week for Prizes!

    Posted by Tom Kalil on November 9, 2009 at 4:28 PM EDT

    In his Strategy for American Innovation, released in September, President Obama directed agencies to increase their use of incentive prizes as a tool for stimulating technological innovation. The White House is enthusiastic about prizes for a number of reasons:

    • Prizes are the ultimate pay for performance approach; the government only pays if someone is successful.
    • Prizes allow the government to establish an ambitious goal without specifying the best means to accomplish that goal.
    • Prizes can catalyze private sector investment that is many times the value of the purse.
    • Prizes attract new ideas and new entrants that would never respond to a traditional RFP.
    • The competition itself can capture the public imagination and change the public's attitudes about what is possible.

    Last week was a phenomenal week for prizes, a number of which are being supported by the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

    Congratulations to the winners, the agency and private-sector sponsors, and the partnering organizations such as the X Prize Foundation and the Spaceward Foundation! The Office of Science and Technology Policy is working with a variety of Federal departments, foundations, and prize experts, and we hope to have additional progress to report on prizes in the months ahead.

    Tom Kalil is Deputy Director for Policy at the Office of Science and Technology Policy

  • Who are the Next Lickliders?

    Posted by Tom Kalil on September 28, 2009 at 5:17 PM EDT

    Although I never had the privilege of meeting him, one of my personal heroes is J.C.R. Licklider, an MIT professor who became head of the Information Processing Technology Office at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) in 1962.

    Licklider helped jumpstart computer science as a discipline by providing funding to the universities that were first to establish Ph.D. programs in the field, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. He also formed a group of researchers that he jokingly referred to as the Intergalactic Computer Network, many of whom went on to build the ARPANET, the predecessor to today’s Internet.

    His writing is remarkably prescient. In 1968, for example, he wrote an article entitled The Computer as a Communications Device (pdf). In it he stated that “life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.” He also predicted future technological developments such as digital libraries, e-commerce, and online banking. This vision had a profound influence on the field of computer science, helping to spark a revolution in information and communications technologies (pdf).

    I believe that one of the most important things that the Office of Science and Technology Policy can do is to shine a spotlight on the next “Lickliders”—researchers and innovators who have powerful ideas with the potential to produce significant economic and societal benefits. We hope that people with big ideas will work with the Administration to establish a foundation for the technologies and industries of the future, and address the “grand challenges” of the 21st century.

    So—who do you think might be the Lickliders of this generation?

    Tom Kalil is OSTP’s Deputy Director for Policy