Transcript Limitations on Indirect Cost Rate Recovery Under NSF Program

NSF
Division of Mathematical Sciences
Statistics Program
Gabor J Szekely
Statistics Program Director
ASA Chairs Workshop
Alexandria, VA, August 1, 2009
What does Statistics support?
Individual Investigators & Small Groups

Focused Research Groups (FRG); CMG, Joint
DMS/NIGMS activity; etc,
Institutes

SAMSI
Workforce
NSF- and MPS-wide Initiatives

Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI),
DTRA, etc.
Funding Rate
2,500
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0
FY97 FY98 FY99 FY00 FY01 FY02 FY03 FY04 FY05 FY06 FY07
Actions
Awards
Rate
Sir Winston Churchill:
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every
opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity
in every difficulty.“
2009 was difficult and extremely volatile
20% budget cut? 50% stimulus?
Long delays
in processing awards
many email exchanges about the nature
of ARRA and about the length of delay
Life is Good (?)
2009: financial problems everywhere
2009: NSF ARRA $3 billion
(50% of NSF budget)
Statistics received a fair share?
Statistics Program Budget???
$ ????
Lower bound, upper bound
Interagency programs: NIGMS, DTRA
Interdisciplinary program within NSF:
CMG, CDI, …
Many new areas, few unifying theories
Statisticians are more flexible in their research
areas than most scientists
This is good (many important applications, good
grant opportunities)
This is bad (statistics becomes too thin, there
are too many seemingly unrelated methods)
Where are the unifying theories?
We cannot fund proposals
… NOT submitted !!! Trivial but …
This is where you can help:
Please encourage submissions of great ideas:
NOT true : if the PI is not an international star OR
if the PI’s institute is not in the top tier
then the proposal is almost surely declined.
WE NEED NEW
TRANSFORMATIVE IDEAS
In case of many International Stars of
Statistics (ISS) we know what we get:
high quality, deep proposals,
many hot topics that were transformative
a few years/decades ago
Please encourage new researchers to
submit new transformative ideas
Transformative … ?
RA Fisher Statistical Methods for Research
Workers …
cited by 7900
A Wald Sequential Analysis cited by 2669
JW Tukey Exploratory Data Analysis-5620
ARRA (stimulus money)
Who received ARRA money from the
Statistics ARRA budget?
1. New researchers
2. Outstanding PhD advisors
What do we support?
Everything that is `transformative’
Outstanding collaborations with other
disciplines, important applications
Unifying theories
A crises is a terrible thing
to waste