Global-Scale Projects and Research Networks

The National Science Foundation plays a lead role in more than two dozen international-scale projects and is a major participant in many others. The Foundation provides substantial financial support for these projects and the Foundation's senior management and staff play major roles in shaping, managing, and coordinating the programs in both national and international contexts. The following gives an overview of the major international initiatives undertaken or supported by the NSF.

One of the largest and most extensive internationally coordinated research programs ever undertaken,the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), involves major resource commitments from ten US government agencies, about 1.7 billion. Created as a Presidential Initiative in 1989 and formalized in 1990 by the Global Change Research Act of 1990, since that time global change research has remained a key science initiative. Continuing to improve scientific understanding of the Earth system is a priority of the National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Environment and Natural Resources.

USGCRP scientists coordinate many of their programs with those of their counterparts in other countries to aggregate the scientific and financial resources needed for the study of global processes on a cohesive and comprehensive basis. This coordination is achieved through a series of global and regional programs. Some of the most important of these international connections are identified in Our Changing Planet (FY2002), the latest in a series of yearly reports on the USGCRP that accompany the President's Annual Budget. Also, the US Global Change Research Information Office (GCRIO) provides access to data and information on global environmental change research and global change related educational resources on behalf of the USGCRP

The Foundation's Global Change Research Program supports research to advance fundamental understanding of dynamic physical, biological, and socioeconomic systems and the interactions among them. The programs encourage interdisciplinary activities with particular focus on Earth system processes and the consequences of change.

NSF's Office of Polar Programs (OPP) supports the the Polar UV Radiation Monitoring Network, a high-latitude network of scanning spectroradiometers operated since 1988 at three sites in Antarctica (McMurdo Station, Palmer Station, and South Pole Station), two sites in the US ( Barrow, Alaska and San Diego, California),and one site in Ushuaia, Argentina. Data from these sites has proved invaluable in research on the effects of increased UV radiation due to ozone depletion.

LEFT: The Ushusia instrument is installed in the roof of the main CADIC building and is surrounded by mountains ranging in elevation from 2.5° (at bearings of 120° - 206°) to 17° (at bearings of 298° - 302°). Progress on global change research topics would be impossible without advanced instrumentation.

For example, the NSF Polar UV Monitoring Network is made up of six SUV-100 scanning spectroradiometers.

The Ushuaia, Argentina installation, the fourth system added to the network, is located near the southern port city of Ushuaia, Argentina, at the Centro Austral de Investigaciones Cientificas (CADIC) facility. CADIC is a regional research center of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). The installation is located in the foothills of the Andes, an area subject to frequent clouds.

In order to achieve understanding of world wide sea level changes, the NSF's global geodetic program is supported through the University NAVSTAR Consortium (UNAVCO), which has an international membership; a substantial fraction of the currently-supported projects are outside the U.S., and involve cooperation with the national geodetic agencies of other countries.

The primary objective of Ridge Interdisciplinary Global Experiments (RIDGE) is to understand the geological, chemical, biological, and physical oceanographic interactions between the oceans and hydrothermal circulation of seawater through the ocean crust.

The RIDGE Program was phased out recently and a new RIDGE 2000 Program took its place. RIDGE 2000 is a community-based science initiative focused on integrated geological and biological studies of the Earth-encircling mid-ocean ridge system.

Central to the RIDGE 2000 Science Plan is the recognition that the origin and evolution of life in deep-sea ecosystems are inextricable linked to, and perhaps an inevitable consequence of, the flow of energy and material from Earth's deep mantle, through the volcanic and hydrothermal systems of the oceanic crust, to the deep ocean.

The program recognizes that the complex linkages between life and planetary processes at mid-ocean ridges can only be understood through tightly integrated studies that span a broad range of disciplines and three sites have been chosen as the initial RIDGE 2000 Integrated Study sites

The four major international elements of the international global change research effort are the World Climate Research Program (WCRP), the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), the International Human Dimensions Program (IHDP) and Diversitas. How humans interact with the environment, how individuals and societies can mitigate or adapt to environmental change, and how policy responses to such changes influence economic and social conditions are at the center of research on the human dimensions of global environmental change within the IHDP. Key IHDP programs underway address Land Use and Land Cover Change and the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change.

NSF also plays a key role in hemispheric or regional global change research efforts, One of the three regional institutes for global change research – Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) is an intergovernmental organization with U.S. participation dedicated to global change research, to augmenting the scientific capacity of the Americas, and to providing information in a useful and timely manner to policymakers. The primary objectives of the support that the NSF provides to the IAI on behalf of the United States are to encourage comparative research and focused global change research important to the region as a whole and beyond the scope of individual national programs.

The other two regional networks, the European Network for Research in Global Change (ENRICH) and the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN), were also created to facilitate the integration of global change research programs on a regional basis. The Global Change System for Analysis, Research, and Training (START) program involves developing countries more fully in global change research. See also GEO International Activities.

GCRP major international studies and experiments involving NSF support currently include:

• the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS). See also International JGOFS and US JGOFS sites.
• the Arctic System Science(ARCSS)Program and the ARCSS Data Coordination Center (ADCC) at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC);
• the Water and Energy: Atmospheric, Vegetative, and Earth Interactions (WEAVE) Initiative. See also the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, particularly the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) and the Biological Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle (BAHC); and
• the Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics.

See also:

  US GLOBEC
  The Georges Bank Study
  The North Pacific site
  The Southern Ocean site
  International GLOBE

In one ARCSS project, the Greenland Ice Sheet Project II (GISP2), an ice core was recovered from the Summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet where ice thickness is greater than 3000m.

In addition to the research focused on global change, NSF continues to conduct research on topics closely related to global change. In addition, many NSF-sponsored research projects consider interactions linking ecosystems and human activities with other factors including climate variability and change. Examples include the Long-term Ecological Research sites, which provide perspectives on ecological responses to climate change and other stresses: Antarctic Ecosystems; and Coastal Long-Term Ecological Research

NSF's Geosciences Directorate (GEO) also supports the interagency National Space Weather Program (NSWP), upper atmosphere research to provide timely, accurate and reliable space environment observations and forecasts. These are enriched by data from state-of-the-art facilities from Sondestrom, Greenland to Jicamarca, Peru, which provide arrays of optical and radio wave remote sensing instruments for observing and measuring changes in Earth's upper atmosphere and near-space environment.

In the lower atmosphere/ocean interface, NSF's Geosciences Directorate (GEO) supports the Global Tropospheric Chemistry Program(GTCP), a major contributor to a number of IGBP and WCRP programs, and the WCRP's Climate Variability and Predictability Program (CLIVAR). See also US CLIVAR site and International CLIVAR sites.

Facilities and infrastructure for the above programs is provided through the interagency funded U.S. academic research fleet of more than two dozen vessels; a number of research aircraft; sample storage facilities for the ODP;the upper atmosphere observatories in Greenland (Kangerlussuaq (Sondre Stomfjord)) and in Peru (Jicamarca Radio Observatory).

(See photo: Optical backscattering from arctic noctilucent clouds at 85 km altitude measured with the Rayleigh lidar at Kangerlussuaq (Sondre Stomfjord), Greenland.)

Facilities supported under NSF CEDAR(Coupling Energetic and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions) include the Bear Lake Observatory in Utah, the Longyearbyen Optical Station in Norway, and the Early Polar Cap Observatory in Resolute Bay, Canada. With international collaborations from the Far East to Europe, the Center for Clouds, Chemistry, and Climatefacilities are supported as an NSF Science and Technology Center.

NSF/GEO and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) support the large deployment of facilities for the field experiment of the Fronts and Atlantic Storm-Track EXperiment (FASTEX).

The NSF/GEO Global Seismic Network (GSN) is the U.S. component of an international set of globally deployed seismographs. The United States participates with France, Japan, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada, and Italy in a federation of networks that provides shared access to seismic data. GSN is managed by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). GEO is also involved in the international system for the exchange of scientific data and information, through geographic information systems (GIS), and related activities.

NSF/OPP is charged with managing all U.S. activities in the Antarctic as a single, integrated program. NSF/OPP participates on the delegations of two Antarctic treaties: the Antarctic Treaty, which sets aside Antarctica for peaceful purposes and encourages international scientific collaborations and the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which regulates commercial fishing and directs scientific research to preserve the marine ecosystem.

The US Antarctic Program (USAP) maintains Antarctica as an area of international cooperation reserved for peaceful purposes, to pursue unique opportunities for scientific research to understand Antarctica and its role in global environmental systems, to protect the relatively pristine environment and its associated ecosystems, and to assure the conservation and sustainable management of the living resources in the surrounding oceans.

OPP international work includes International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE), an international effort to collect and interpret a continental wide array of environmental parameters including transfer functions between the atmosphere and snow/ice interface.

Scientists from 15 countries are traversing Antarctica, collecting ice cores and gathering data that will describe climate and environmental change over the past 200 years.

US ITASE is, collecting surface and near surface snow and ice samples and conducting radar studies to determine the internal stratigraphy and bedrock topography of the terrain along a traverse in West Antarctica. (See Map: West Antarctica Showing US ITASE traverse corridors.)

One major large-scale multinational project is Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB) coordinated under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). NSF supports U.S. participation in such projects as the Biological Research Inventorying and Monitoring (BRIM) program and the Northern Sciences Network.

The Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI)is a major international plant biology effort that involves more than 2,500 laboratories and 8,000 scientists worldwide using a new generation of tools to probe this plant's genome.

The AGI began in 1996, unifying the efforts of international teams who had been decoding this important genome sequence since the early 1990s. Representatives from each of the major Arabidopsis sequencing centers met at the NSF to agree on a collaborative approach. In the US, an interagency program began in 1996 with funds from NSF, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture . The European Union, the Government of France, and the Chiba Prefectural Government in Japan similarly support AGI research.

Also, in the biological sciences, the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) is a multinational effort to enhance international collaboration in basic research focused on complex mechanisms of living organisms; fields supported range from brain functions to biological functions at the molecular level.

The Foundation and other three federal agencies contribute to the program which involves involve extensive collaboration among teams of scientists working in different countries, fellowships available to scientists who wish to work in a laboratory in another country, with emphasis on individuals early in their careers, and workshops.

In 1999, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Human Frontier Science Program, ceremonies were organized on three continents: one in Tokyo , one in Strasbourg, and a third in Washington in December 1999.

The 10th Anniversary brochure captures outstanding achievements of the program over the decade, including the awarding of five Nobel Prizes to researchers from four countries (Germany, Switzerland, UK, and US) after being involved in a Human Frontier Science Program project. An essential component of the Human Frontier Science is " Intercontinentality" Between 1990 and 1998, 372 research grants were awarded. In most cases, cooperation extended to three, four or five laboratories, situated in as many countries, linking up as many as four continents in a common research effort. Four-fifths of the projects involved two or more continents—and a third at least three continents.

The NSF/BIO supports the Protein Data Bank (PDB), the single worldwide repository for the processing and distribution of 3-D biological macromolecular structure data. The NIH, DOE and the NSF fund the PDB, managed by the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), a consortium comprised of: Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)

The PDB allows for complex queries and facilitates access to other databases through linkage and integration. In addition to PDB partner sites in the US, PDB supports sites in the UK, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil, and updates for sites in Argentina,Australia, China France, India, Israel, Poland, and Taiwan.

NSF/BIO also supports expanding an international group of Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) Network sites. Global scientific interest in developing long-term ecological research (LTER) programs is expanding very rapidly, reflecting the increased appreciation of their importance in assessing and resolving complex environmental issues. As of May 2000, twenty-one countries had established formal national LTER programs and joined the ILTER network. Ten more were actively pursuing the establishment of national networks and many others had expressed interest in the model. Most member networks contributed to a 1998 book on the ILTER network. Country chapters may be consulted on line. There is also a table summarizing characteristics of the networks.

This group meets annually in one of the member countries. Reports of past meetings are available. The 1999 Annual International LTER Meeting was held in Kruger National Park, South Africa, August 16, 1999 There was extensive discussion of opportunities for network-wide research collaboration, including several activities coordinated by international environmental networks associated with ILTER the Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS)and GTNET. (See photos from the Kruger National Park field trip.)

Members of the ILTER Network:

• Canada,US
• Costa Rica, Brazil,Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela
• UK, Switzerland
• Czech Republic,Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine
• Australia,China, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan
• Israel
• Nambia

Other NSF/BIO large-scale projects include the interagency NeuroLab (NASA/NSF/NIH/NIMH/ONR and international partners). Neurolab is a collaborative effort of many nations of the world, responsive to the congressionally declared Decade of the Brain. A NASA Neurolab Mission in April 1998 was dedicated to neuroscience-related experiments on animals and humans.Data from the flight has not yet been analyzed. NSF/BIO expects such work will advance research on how microgravity and other features found only in space flight affect nervous systems, add to public education about neuroscience and space technology, and provide potential benefits to applied aspects of neuroscience.

Another large-scale NSF/BIO project is FLYBRAIN, an online atlas and database of the Drosophila nervous system involving Germany and Japan. Facility support and research grants to the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) a nonprofit consortium of 64 universities and research institutions in the US, Costa Rica, Perú, Canada, South Africa, México and Australia are also funded by NSF/BIO, including the Arthropods of La Selva Project (ALAS), a large-scale inventory of arthropod diversity in a lowland tropical rainforest, The project represents a collaboration not only between disciplines, but also between OTS and Costa Rica's National Biodiversity Institute (INBio).

Copiphora cf. cultricornis - one of the new species of katydids discovered by ALAS investigators

Partially supported by the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering(INT), students in OTS Duke University courses visit a series of OTS biological field stations, including the Palo Verde Research Station, in northwest Costa Rica, and the LaSelva Biological Station, one of the world's leading centers for research on tropical rainforest ecology. With advice and assistance from faculty, students design and carry out their own short research projects.

NSF/BIO funds International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups(ICBG), an interagency (NSF/NIH/USDA) activity to support "bioprospecting" for potential therapeutic agents in the context of biodiversity conservation and sustainable economic development in developing countries.

A second cohort of 5-year awards was announced in FY 2000 (NIH Press Release ). Six groups of diverse private and public institutions, including universities, pharmaceutical companies and environmental organizations, will collaborate on projects in ten countries. Support for this program will total approximately $3.5 million per year over the next five years, shared among the NIH, NSF, and USDA.

As one example, the Bioactive Agents from Dryland Biodiversity of Latin America project is an extension of ICBG research begun in 1993. The project involves discovery and development of pharmaceuticals and crop-protection agents from plants and microbes of arid and semi-arid ecosystems in Chile, Argentina and Mexico. Results show promise for developing prescription medicines that may aid in treatment of infectious diseases, cardiovascular, central nervous system and gastrointestinal disorders.

Extension of the grant allows expanding into new ecosystems such as islands off the coast of Chile, parts of southern Mexico, and the Chaco area of northern Argentina The project involves participants in the US, Chile, Argentina and Mexico.

Biocomplexity in the Environment(BE)is a multi-year NSF competition designed to promote new approaches to investigating the interactivty of biota and the environment -- the interrelationships that arise when living things at all levels- from molecular structures to genes to ecosystems--interact with their environment. Researchers work in diverse fields that go beyond biology to physics, systems engineering, economics, geochemistry and others, on studies from the submolecular to mass changes in climate with potential for worldwide impact.

The FY2000 Competition supported research to advance understanding of interacting biological, physical and social systems, so that our ability to predict system behavior is enhanced (NSF Press Release 00-73). The FY 2001 Competition promoted comprehensive, integrated investigations of environmental systems using advanced scientific and engineering methods. Investigators were encouraged to adopt a global perspective .

Initial awards were announced in November 2000 to fund 12 research projects under a new Ecology of Infectious Diseases initiative. The NSF/BIO and NIH initiative supports efforts to understand the underlying ecological and biological mechanisms that govern relationships between human-induced environmental changes and the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases. (NSF Press Release 00-86) Awards include:

• Researchers at the University of Salford (UK), together with investigators in China, France, Ireland, Japan, and the US, will study the transmission of human alveolar echinococcosis (a highly pathogenic disease resulting from infection by a tapeworm) in farming communities in China.

• University of California (Berkeley) investigators will collaborate with investigators from South Africa to study the spread and impact of bovine tuberculosis in the African buffalo in South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

• Researchers at Case Western Reserve University, will lead a collaboration of investigators from the United States, Israel, and Kenya to research the impact of human population growth and climate variation on human infection rates by the blood fluke Schistosoma haematobium in Kenya.

In order to bring biodiversity information to the Internet, where it will be freely accessible to anyone, a consortium of 28 interested countries and intergovernmental organizations is coordinating plans to form the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). NSF/BIO senior management chairs the interim steering committee for GBIF, consisting of a series of interconnected databases containing information about the worldís living organisms, from bacteria to plants to mammals. (NSF Press Release 00-67).

For the NSF Computer & Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE), the number of large-scale multi-institutional projects with international partners continues to grow. Historically,from the early days of the NSFNET, international networking activities have helped to connect the US research and education community with academic counterparts and resources around the world.

The International Connections Management (ICM) project (1991-96) assisted about 25 countries in connecting to the NSFNET. One highlight of the ICM project was a satellite teleport gateway for Latin America in Homestead, Florida. Another was a connection for Mongolia in 1996. Among ICM's "firsts" was a 45 Mbps trans-Atlantic link to London in July, 1995 (a record-breaking capacity at that time). The link continued on at 34 Mbps to Stockholm to join NSFNET with NORDUnet. This opened the door to what are now many transoceanic fiber links at 45 and 155 Mbps.

More recently, international networking activity established the Science, Technology and Research Transit Access Point (STAR TAP) in Chicago as a persistent anchor for interconnecting NSF's very-high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) with advanced networks that are dedicated to supporting high-performance applications and developing new networking technologies. By early 1999, about 15 country nets as well as the U.S. Next Generation Internet (NGI) networks and Abilene had been interconnected at STAR TAP. The High-Performance International Internet Services (HPIIS) project made awards for sharing some of the costs of the high-performance connections to TransPAC, a U.S.- Asia-Pacific consortium, to MirNET, a U.S.- Russia consortium, and to Euro-Link,a connection of European and Israeli National Research Networks (NRNs) to the high-performance vBNS and Abilene networks.

Today,STAR TAP is the premier global exchange point for advanced international networking, in support of applications, performance measuring, and technology evaluations. STAR TAP is documenting the international collaborations it helps foster. The complete set of applications as of October 20, 2000 is available by category and event. Examples of STAR TAP iGrid 2000 applications demonstrate how the power of today's research networks enables access to remote computing resources, distribution of digital media, and collaboration with distant colleagues.

	Distributed Particle Physics Research [United States and CERN] California Institute of Technology, USA; CERN, Switzerland
	Distributed Simulation Analysis between Scientists Located in Germany, USA, and Japan [United States, Germany and Japan] Sandia National Laboratories, USA
	GiDVN: Global Internet Digital Video Network [United States, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Korea, Singapore, The Netherlands, Sweden, CERN and Spain] International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR), Northwestern University, USA

A session in the Scalable Network Infrastructure track featured instructors from the University of Oregon, Cisco Systems and BSDI Systems in the Netherlands. Other photos are here.

Funds from NSF and other sponsors are helping the African Network Operators Group (AFNOG) prepare African network engineers to manage email, mailing lists, World Wide Web, domain name servers and help desks as demand for services expands rapidly.

AFNOG’s first benefits emerged due to an intensive, five-day series of courses held at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in May 2000. Organizers from Ghana, Kenya and Uganda arranged for sessions led by instructors from Ghana, Togo, Mali, South Africa, the US, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. (NSF PR 00-50)

Founded in 1999, AFNOG works with the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), a non-profit organization that for the past decade has helped design and deploy computer networks in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Under an NSF/CISE award, the NSRC works in collaboration with the Advanced Network Technology Center (ANTC) at the University of Oregon to help international academic institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) gain Internet access.

The need for such grass-root efforts to bridge the international Digital Divide was affirmed at the July 2000 G-8 Economic Summit in Okinawa, Japan. The participating nations agreed to establish a Digital Opportunity Task Force to promote the adoption of information technologies in developing nations.

DLI2 International Digital Libraries Projects

Also, a series of joint NSF-European Union (EU) Working Groups on Future Directions for Digital Libraries Research were set up and reported on their efforts to jointly explore technical, social and economic issues, plan common research agendas, share research results, and explore national, technical, and social expectations about digital libraries.

NSF Partnerships in digital libraries also were encouraged:

• NSF-JISC (US-UK)
• NSF-DFG (US-Germany)
• NSF-EU (US-European Union)

Regarding large-scale projects, the NSF Directorate for Physical and Mathematical Sciences (MPS) supports the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), a project to conduct a detailed study of solar internal structure and dynamics using helioseismology. (NSF Press Release 00-15)

Helioseismology utilizes waves that propagate throughout the Sun to measure, for the first time, the invisible internal structure and dynamics of a star. In order to exploit this new technique, GONG has developed a six-station network of solar velocity imagers located around the Earth to obtain continuous observations of the oscillations of the Sun. The six sites comprising the GONG Network are:

• The Big Bear Solar Observatory in California, USA.
• The High Altitude Observatory at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, USA.
• The Learmonth Solar Observatory inWestern Australia.
• The Udaipur Solar Observatory in India.
• The Observatorio del Teide in the Canary Islands.
• The Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in Chile.

NSF/MPS, NSF/ENG, and the Office of International Science & Engineering (INT) is attempting to create an internet-based worldwide materials research network to enhance scientific and educational collaborations. With this objective, a series of international workshops have been sponsored to help stimulate enhanced collaboration among materials researchers and create networks linking the participating countries. (See also the newsletter of the International Union of Materials Research: http://iumrs.org)

Other regional workshops also identified possible areas for mutually beneficial collaborations.

• U.S.-Asian Pacific Materials Research, Technology, and Education for the 21st Century in Service of Society Workshop, Hawaii, November 1998, participants from the United States and Asian Pacific countries

• Frontiers in Materials Research, Technology and Education: A Workshop to Advance Panamerican Collaboration, Brazil, June 1998, participants from the United States and Pan American countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela

• Workshop on Materials for Future Technologies, Belgium, December 1996, a joint National Science Foundation-European Commission venture

• Trilateral Materials Workshop, Mexico, May 1995, researchers from the United States, Canada, and Mexico

A sixth workshop involving the Middle East countries is being explored.

As a result of the NSF-EC workshop, and as part of the implementation of an Agreement for Scientific and Technological Cooperation Between the European Community and the Government of the United States of America, the NSF entered into an implementing arrangement with a European Union program that supports materials research. Since December 1999 three "Dear Colleague" letters have been issued announcing opportunities for cooperative activities in materials research between US and European researchers to be supported by NSF and the EC.

One project under this competition, Current Induced Magnetic Switching in Sub-micron Sized Multilayers, is a joint undertaking between Michigan State University's Condensed Matter Physics - Experimental group and the Université de Paris Laboratoire de Physique des Solides in Orsay, France. The research concerns the current induced magnetic switching in sub-micron sized multilayers. This topic is of great importance both on account of its intrinsic interest, as well as for its technological relevance.

Lowering detectors into the ice cap

The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) neutrino telescope project at South Pole Station -- a US-Sweden-Germany-Belgian collaboration, jointly supported by NSF's OPP and MPS, the Department of Energy (DOE), and several European agencies -- is the world's largest detector of the neutrino--and the first that can claim to be an astronomical instrument rather than a physics experiment. AMANDA was featured in Scientific American's "Extreme Engineering" February 2000 issue, in the article " Seven Wonders of Modern Astronomy " -- The Wierdest Wonder.

AMANDA trades sensitivity for the sheer size needed to catch high-energy neutrinos from distant objects, which include the swirling gas around black holes, the innards of stellar explosions, the decomposition of the unidentified matter that dominates our cosmos.

So far the $7-million collaboration consists of 424 glass orbs, each the size of a basketball. Scientists watch for the glow indirectly emitted when neutrinos collide with atomic nuclei in the ice or underlying rock. The orbs point downward so that Earth will screen out extraneous particles. Ultimately, scientists want 5,000 orbs on 80 cables throughout a cubic kilometer of ice. (Images: University of Wisconsin The Amanda Collaboration)

Inside the hole

The major participation of NSF's Education and Human Resources Directorate (EHR) in large-scale international efforts is through support of a series of multinational studies in education to help inform US education priorities. TIMSS 1999, a successor to the acclaimed 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), focused on the mathematics and science achievement of eighth-grade students.The TIMSS- 1999 Benchmarking Report news conference on April 4, 2001 in Washington, D.C. included remarks by the NSF Director (NSF Press Release 01-24 )

The Executive Summary shows US eighth graders performed significantly above the TIMSS international average in science, but about in the middle of the achievement distribution of the 38 participating countries (above 18 countries, similar to 5, and below 14). World class performance levels were set essentially by four Asian countries and a central European one. Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Hungary, Japan, and the Republic of Korea had the highest average performance.

The Foundation also supports U.S. participation in the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), its constituent societies, and several of its scientific committees such as the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), the Special Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), the

Countries in bold also participated in the TIMSS 1995 eighth-grade assessment.

Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE). Support for these components totals about $2 million annually.

In convening a World Conference on Science for the Twenty-First Century , from 26 June to 1 July 1999 in Budapest, Hungary, ICSU and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in co-operation with other partners, provided a unique forum for discussion between the scientific community and society. The World Conference on Science was conceived as a process consisting of a preparatory phase, the Conference itself and a follow-up program on science for the twenty-first century.

NSF Support for International Facilities

The Foundation is the primary supporter of a number of facilities that are predominantly international in character. Some of these facilities are located overseas, in which cases there are explicit frameworks for multinational support, with foreign contributions often provided in-kind. In those cases where the facilities are located on U.S. soil, construction and operating costs are most often (but not always) borne by the Foundation.The Gemini North telescope dedicated on June 25, 1999, near the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea, is an example of international cost-sharing of a facility on US soil. (NSF Media Advisory PA/M 99-16)

Overseas Facilities

The international facilities supported by NSF/MPS in the Astronomical Sciences include:

Cosmic shear: the light from distant galaxies is distorted by dark matter.

Astrophysicists announced in the May 11, 2000 issue of Nature. the first observations of cosmological shear, an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. The discovery casts light on the distribution of the dark matter that makes up much of the universe. Using CTIO and a method known as weak gravitational lensing, the scientists were the first to map the distribution of dark matter over large swaths of the sky. (NSF Press Release 00-29)

NSF/MPS serves as the executive agency for the Gemini Observatory, an international project with seven partner nations (the U.S., the UK, Canada, Australia, Chile, Brazil and Argentina).

The Gemini Observatory consists of two 8-meter telescopes, one located at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, (Gemini North) and Cerro Pachón in central Chile (Gemini South), and hence provides full coverage of both hemispheres of the sky. Both telescopes incorporate new technologies that allow large, relatively thin mirrors under active control to collect and focus both optical and infrared radiation from space. Gemini North began science operations in mid-2000 and Gemini South about a year later.(NSF Media Advisory PA/M 99-16)

NSF/MPS is also involved in the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) project, a developing international partnership with the European community, to place a new radio facility in northern Chile. Potential future partners are Canada and Japan. NSF provided funds for design and development of the facility for 3 years. The project is preparing to move into the last year of design and development before project construction. The European partnership, should the project move forward, will provide 50% of total project funding.

ALMA conceptual image courtesy of the European Southern Observatory (ESO)

NSF/MPS, in partnership with the Department of Energy, is involved in the development of a major international high energy physics project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), that will be located at CERN(European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC is an accelerator which brings protons and ions into head-on collisions at higher energies than ever achieved before. This will allow scientists to penetrate still further into the structure of matter and recreate the conditions prevailing in the early universe, just after the "Big Bang".

Another example of the NSF/MPS role in funding large detectors is the Pierre Auger cosmic ray detector project. This is a multinational effort in which NSF/MPS and DOE are contributing equally to the construction costs. The US costs will be $15 million, about 15% of the total. NSF and DOE share the responsibilities for oversight of the US part, with neither agency designated as lead. NSF-supported researchers are leading this project.

The Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica (CARA) is a consortium of US universities run from the University of Chicago. CARA is an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC). The STC Program is administered through the Office of Integrative Activities (OIP) at NSF. The activities of CARA include the siting of telescopes in Antarctica. CARA is funded and managed by NSF/OPP.

The Cape Roberts Project, supported by NSF/OPP, is an international ocean-floor drilling program aimed at recovering paleoenvironmental records from the time when ice sheets were just showing up on Antarctica through the time when the ice sheets became basically a permanent feature. In 1998, the first evidence of large volcanic eruptions that shook Antarctica around 25 million years ago was discovered in rock cores retrieved from the seabed under the auspices of the Project. (NSF Press Release 98-78)

OPP has a myrid of international collaborations on a wide variety of scales. For the Antarctic Program, the U.S. Antarctic Program, 1999-2000 report captures something of this extensive international partnering. Formal mechanisms include the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs (COMNAP, a U.S. initiative, administered by the American Geophysical Union). OPP has also been extensively involved in Arctic Council activities. This high level intergovernmental forum addresses environmental protection and sustainable development in the Arctic region. OPP participates in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), an international multi-year program to assess the impact and effects of climate change, including environmental, human health, social and economic impacts.

The research and education facilities of the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) in Costa Rica receive support from NSF/BIO. OTS is a nonprofit consortium of 64 universities and research institutions in the US, Costa Rica, Perú, Canada, South Africa, México and Australia. OTS provides graduate, undergraduate and professional training, facilitates research, maintains three biological stations in Costa Rica, participates in conservation activities and conducts environmental education programs.

International Research Centers and Facilities in the United States

All NSF-supported research facilities in the United States are open to visiting scientists and students from other countries. Some facilities, however, are explicitly committed to international service, often having institutional agreements and arrangements with partner institutions in other countries.

Examples of such facilities are:

The NSF/GEO National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) engages in a number of collaborative programs involving atmospheric research institutions in Canada, Germany, Australia, and Russia. The Annual Scientific Report for 2000 serves to provide a sense of the breadth of recent collaboration.

ELDORA (ELectra DOppler RAdar) is an airborne, dual beam, meteorological research radar developed jointly at NCAR and the Centre de Recherches en Physique de L'Environnement Terrestre et Planetaire (CRPE), France. The largest single instrument ever developed at NCAR, ELDORA mounted aboard Electra aircraft tracks tornadoes and the thunderstorms that spawn them.

COSMIC is the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate, a joint U.S.-Taiwan project. This experimental program uses a constellation of six micro-satellites to provide the data derived from the Global Positioning System (GPS) for research in meteorology, ionosphere and climate.

This proof-of-concept experiment is managed by the NSF-supported University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), with additional US support from NOAA, NASA, USAF, and ONR. The National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan provides a large share of the support for this project.

NSF/BIO supports the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) at Ohio State University (See "Global Scale Projects" section in this Report) which serves a worldwide research community by providing collection, preservation and distribution of seeds, and DNA clone and library storage and DNA clone distribution services. The ABRC database functions and ordering system are incorporated into TAIR , a searchable relational database.

LIGO Livingston Observatory
Livingston, Louisiana

LIGO Hanford Observatory
Hanford, Washington

The NSF/MPS Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a facility dedicated to detection of cosmic gravitational waves and the harnessing of these waves for scientific research. It consists of two widely separated installations -- one in Washington and the other in Louisiana -- operated as a single observatory.

LIGO is being built by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). LIGO will function as a national resource for both physics and astrophysics and is becoming part of a planned worldwide network of gravitational-wave observatories.

The NSF/MPS Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is part of an international network of interferometric gravitational wave detectors under development, including the France-Italy VIRGO project.

LIGO has agreements with VIRGO and collaborations with the UK-Germany GEO; with TAMA 300, the Japanese project, and with AIGO, Australia's proposed southern hemisphere gravitational wave observatory. the Construction Sites.

The University of Wisconsin’s Synchrotron Radiation Center, supported by NSF/MPS Materials Research (DMR), as a national user facility, receives international financial support from the Canadian government, from the Ecole Polytechnique (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Lausanne, and from the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italian National Research Council) (CNR)to help underwrite the cost of researchers from these countries using this facility.

A collaboration in soft X-ray spectromicroscopy between the Ecole Polytechnique and Wisconsin is developing the electron imaging spectromicroscope MEPHISTO to study the uptake of foreign elements in brain cells and other biological tissue. Other work with MEPHISTO spectromicroscopy involves collaboration with scientists with the Istituto di Struttura della Materia (ISM) in Rome, part of the CNR. A collaboration in photochemistry between McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and Wisconsin is aimed at breaking molecular bonds selectively by excitations from core levels of specific atoms in a molecule.

There are no foreign resources provided directly to other national user facilities for NSF/MPS Materials Research. These facilities maintain an open door policy, without user fees, and provide access to their instruments on a competitive basis, giving priority to U.S. researchers.

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL), which is operated by Florida State University (FSU), Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Florida, with NSF/MPS funding, is extensively engaged in collaborations with international organizations to advance magnet technologies that enhance high field research research magnets. The expertise generated in the design and fabrication of high field research magnets extends far beyond Florida and Los Alamos to Europe, Asia, and Australia.

The NHMFL pulsed field magnets have become an increasingly popular commodity among other pulsed field laboratories around the globe and reliable pulsed magnets are being fabricated for the following organizations: Technische Universitat in Austria; University of Braunschweig, Dresden Research Centre, and Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Germany; University of New South Wales in Australia; Ruppin Institute of Higher Education in Israel; and Service National des Champs Magnetiques Pulses in France. In addition, the NHMFL has provided specialized technical information related to high field magnet technology and high-strength materials to the magnet laboratories at the University of Amsterdam and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Researchers involved with the NHMFL's Pulsed Field Magnets have maintained a long-standing relationship with the Bochvar Institute in Moscow, Russia. Likewise, magnets designed and engineered by the NHMFL are being procured by the National Research Institute for Metals (NRIM) in Tsukuba, Japan. Collaborations with the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory have generated cost savings measures in resistive magnets for both laboratories. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed with the Nijmegen High Field Magnet Laboratory(Netherlands) in 1999 to pursue joint production of resistive magnet coils for the major upgrade of this facility.

Essentially all of the NSF/MPS Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) have active international collaborations ranging from interactions among individual scientists to Center supported workshops and symposia, as well as student and faculty exchange programs.

The Princeton Center for Complex Metals (PCCM) hosted in July 2000 the International Conference on Solid Films and Surfaces (ICSFS-10).ICSFS, previously held in Tokyo (1978), Washington (1981), Sydney (1984), Hamamatsu (1987),Providence (1989), Paris (1992), Hsinchu (1994), Osaka (1996) and Copenhagen (1998), is a very important forum of discussion of the latest experimental and theoretical advances in the field of solid films and surfaces. ICSFS typically attracts 200-250 scientists from all over the world.

The Materials Research Laboratory(MRL) at the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) was pivotal to a five-year, $15-million alliance formed in February 2001 to support research and education in advanced materials and in solid state lighting and displays between UCSB and Mitsubishi Chemical."

International collaborations were specifically identified as areas of importance in the MRSEC Program Solicitation of 1999, and continues to be in the FY 2001 mcompetition.

NSF/MPS physics-supported centers and facilities, such as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics (ITAMP), and others, host visiting researchers from other countries, much as many U.S. scientists conduct research at similar facilities in other countries.

As an example, as one of the world's foremost research and teaching institutes, JILA is an international center for collaborative research. The unique Visiting Fellows Program brings distinguished scientists from all over the world to JILA for up to 12 months to collaborate with resident scientists. The presence and participation of these visiting scientists is an important contribution to the atmosphere of scientific excellence at JILA.

The facilities and centers supported by NSF/MPS Mathematical Sciences, such as the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) engage in exchanges of mathematical scientists with other countries. MSRI organized a workshop for October 2001 -- the NSF-funded Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute (PASI) on Inverse Problems (IP).One important objective of the PASI on IP Workshop is to foster international cooperation throughout the Americas by bringing different areas of expertise in the field of IP together in one event. Several of the PASIs funded so far have their own websites.

The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) was founded by and receives major support from Mathematical Sciences. It also receives support and direction from its Participating Institutions (including the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in the Netherlands and the "Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo" M. Picone (IAC), the largest mathematical institute of the Italian National Research Council" (CNR)) and ; Participating Corporations, including international firms such as Siemens.

The NSF funds several Science and Technology Centers (STCs) and Engineering Research Centers (ERCs), which promote long-term collaborative research across disciplines and at the forefront of scientific frontiers. NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRCs) develop long-term partnerships among industry, academe, and government.

Many of these centers have developed substantial international activities. As an example, increasingly, I/UCRCs are involved in international collaborations. In one partnership, the Queen's University at Belfast (I/UCRC) QUESTOR is providing a test bed for the University of Arizona I/UCRC for Microcontamination Control (EEC-9810181). The Queen's University will study the microbiology of organisms in a copper chemical/mechanical process pilot system and how they interact and obtain food (with support from the Northern Ireland Research and Technology Unit). ·

There is also a recently established collaboration between the I/UCRC for Low Power Electronics (CLPE) at the University of Arizona and the Silesian University of Technology in Poland, with an MOU signed in FY 2000. The MOU incorporates the capabilities of the Polish partners in industrial applications of mixed-signal low power electronics to complement the CLPE focus on low voltage, low power microelectronic circuits for portable, battery operated systems such as pagers, cellular phones, laptops, etc.

In one US-Japan Cooperative Research award, "Performance of Improved Ground under Strong Seismic Loading," parallel studies of improved ground to serve as a basis for performance based design are being conducted at PEER in collaboration with UC Davis National Geotechnical Centrifuge, and in Japan with the Public Works Research Institute (PWRI) and the Port and Airport Research Institute (PARI).

Overall, the earthquake hazard mitigation work of NSF Earthquake Engineering Research Centers develops the knowledge that will estimate seismic hazard and enhance the reliability and performance of the world's infrastructure systems. This work was identified as one of NSF's major accomplishments, in celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2000. In the future, NSF will fund the development of a vast new virtual center — the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) — which will link experimenters and analysts worldwide in an Internet-based system created to share experiments, results, observations and models.

A number of NSF Science and Technology Centers (STCs) are conducting joint research and visiting scientist programs with partner institutions in Asia, Europe, Canada and Israel. Among these are the NSF Biological Sciences Directorate's (BIO) Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology (CLMIB) at Carnegie Mellon University. The Center's research extends beyond Carnegie Mellon through collaborative projects with other academic institutions across the US and in Europe.

BIO's Michigan State University Center for Microbial Ecology (CME) founded in 1989 as one of the first eleven STCs " graduated" in FY2000. International recognition of the Center led to several unique collaborative agreements. One of these was with two institutes in Japan focused on the microbial evolution of catabolic pathways. The Center also established collaborative research programs with Russian scientists on microbial communities preserved in permafrost soils that are millions of years old and on the genetic and biochemical characterization of microorganisms with novel biodegradation traits.

Another collaboration was established between scientists from the Center and the National Institute for Resources and the Environment (NIRE) in Japan. The focus of this collaboration was to develop and use novel methods to assess the distribution in the environment of genes required for the catabolism of pollutants. These collaborations provided our students with exposure to excellent and unique science and a perspective of how science is conducted in other cultures. The Center also initiated an international collaboration to integrate existing databases with information on microorganisms. The goal was to enhance access to these databases in ways that would allow investigators to understand better the evolutionary relationships among microorganisms and their characteristics. This collaboration included the American Type Culture Collection, the Japanese Collection of Microorganisms, the German Culture Collection, the Ribosomal Database Project , and Bergey's Manual Trust.

NSF Computer Science and Engineering Directorate's (CISE) Graphics and Visualization Center researchers are working in advisory capacities with Wholly Light Graphics in Jerusalem, Israel, the Center for Complex Systems and Visualization, Bremen, Germany, and the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics (CRCG), based in Providence, Rhode Island. Two Center researchers hold positions on the technical advisory board of CRCG, and Fraunhofer IGD, the parent company, based in Darmstadt, Germany, chose Providence, Rhode Island as the site for its only US branch in order to be near the Center site at Brown University

Both the Center and the CRCG are working on large-scale telecollaboration projects. The CRCG is supplying the Center with a Barco Baron stereoscopic rear-display table so that gestural modeling techniques can be integrated into CRCG's custom CAD system. The Center will also benefit from the CRCG's ATM connection with Fraunhofer IGD in Darmstadt and will contribute to the development and testing of VRTP (Virtual Reality Transfer Protocol), among other projects.

International activities at the Cornell Center site have provided the University of Bristol in the UK reflectance measurements of paint samples for the purpose of studying in detail the perceptual equivalence of a real and a very accurately modeled virtual scene. These measurements are also being made available with the Cornell archive of data from the Light Measurement Lab .

Another NSF center with international activities is the MPS Center for Environmentally Responsible Solvents and Processes In FY 2000, the Center provided outreach and educational tours of laboratory facilities (primarily at North Carolina State University(NCSU) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH)) to academic professionals from international institutions from China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, and Italy in response to requests for knowledge about high-pressure equipment and instrumentation necessary to conduct experiments in CO2.

The Geological Sciences Directorate's (GEO) Center for Clouds, Chemistry, and Climate (C⁴) is involved in the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX). In the INDOEX program, premier environmental scientists and university and goverment institutions from the US, Europe and Indian Ocean region collected in-situ data on the regional cooling effect of sulfate and other aerosols. Building on data collected 1995-1998, an intense field campaign was undertaken during January to April, 1999. Field data was used to calibrate National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Observing System (EOS) instruments to obtain a regional map of the aerosol cooling effect. In conjunction with the regional scale satellite data, the field data was used to include aerosol effects in global warming prediction models.

Fault surface rupture across Shih-Kang Dam, Chi-Chi, Taiwan Earthquake of September 21, 1999.

UNE GRANDE ECOLE D'INGENIEURS ET UN CENTRE DE RECHERCHE

A key element of this project is the integration of student and faculty research activities at two US universities (University of Wisconsin, University of Colorado) with Eurecom in France, the later a recipient of an IEEE Education Award for its innovative integration of mobile wireless, multimedia, and networking. The likelihood of success for this collaborative program is high, because working relationships among the three schools have been established through prior visits, sabbaticals, and collaborations.

Surface Magic Clusters (SMC) form on Si(111) surface