Posted by: Carolyn Bobo
An interdisciplinary team of UNT researchers has received $393,688 from the National Science Foundation to examine how federal science agencies try to make their research relevant to society.
The team received the funding from a new NSF program known as the Science of Science and Innovation Policy, or SciSIP. SciSIP’s purpose is to fund research into how publicly funded science can be made more relevant to the challenges facing society in the 21st century.
The team will study how five science agencies use the process of peer review to ensure that the research they fund is socially relevant. The researchers are calling their project Comparative Assessment of Peer Review, or CAPR, pronounced “caper.”
Robert Frodeman, left, professor of philosophy and religion studies, will be the principal investigator for CAPR. Co-principal investigators are Britt Holbrook, research assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies; Warren Burggren, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of biological sciences; William Moen, associate professor of library and information sciences; and Carl Mitcham, professor of liberal arts and international studies at Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo.
The agencies chosen for the study are the NSF, the National Institutes of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Dutch Technology Foundation.
Other universities that received SciSIP grants from NSF include the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, Harvard University and Northwestern University.
Holbrook says peer review of grant proposals “entails a responsibility of scientists not only to other scientists to conduct the reviews fairly, but also to society to conduct the reviews so that society’s money is well spent.”
Holbrook says the peer review process at NSF involves two criteria for project selection: the intellectual merit of the proposed activity and the proposed research's broader impacts in society.
"As far as intellectual merit is concerned, scientists are in familiar territory," he says. "Scientists are obviously experts about science, and they have some shared standards about what counts as good science. So, intuitively, it makes sense to have them assess the intellectual merit of proposed scientific activities."
Assessing the proposed research's broader impact on society may be more difficult for many scientists because considering society impacts often requires interdisciplinary expertise, he says.
"Scientists are not generally trained as science educators, and most don't have the expertise to evaluate their own education and outreach efforts. Although they may have some idea that they are onto something that may be worth something in terms of money, they won't be able to forecast the economic returns on the public's investments in their research unless they are economists," he says. "A social scientist or a philosopher probably cannot tell you which nanotechnology proposal contains the best science; however, a social scientist or philosopher is probably better equipped than a physicist or materials scientist to address the societal implications of nanotechnology."
Holbrook says the research team will share what they learn about peer review with UNT faculty members to help them write better research proposals. The team may also coordinate some faculty workshops on the Broader Impacts Criterion that the NSF uses in considering proposals, as well as forming "BIC Teams," he says.
"The idea behind BIC Teams is to marshal our resources here at UNT to help researchers who are applying for NSF grants do an outstanding job — not just a decent job, but something that really makes UNT stand out — of addressing the broader impacts of their research," he says.
10:36 AM
http://inhouse.unt.edu/_ping.cfm?blogID=3059
In order to post a comment, you must first login to the Inhouse site.
|
Subscribe to this thread without commenting
|
|