The FY 1999 Budget Request for Engineering is $400.55 million, an increase of $42.58 million, or 11.9 percent, over the FY 1998 Current Plan of $357.97 million.

Engineering innovation, creativity, and excellence are vital to the nation’s security, economy and quality of life. The Engineering Activity (ENG) invests in research and education activities that develop the next generation of engineers and scientists, spur new technological innovations, and create new enterprises and careers. ENG promotes a holistic infrastructure for discovery and learning that is intellectually stimulating, technically advanced, and culturally diverse by:

• Investing in the discovery of engineering knowledge within and among different fields while encouraging new avenues of exploration.
• Making critical investments in facilities, networks and people to assure diversity and quality in the nation’s infrastructure for engineering education and research.
• Improving the quality of engineering education and research by advancing discovery and understanding while concurrently promoting teaching, training, and learning.
• Enabling knowledge transfer among diverse constituencies and communities, leading to a more inclusive and robust engineering enterprise that is capable of delivering a greater return on NSF’s investment.

In addition, recent computer-communications technologies have enabled information-rich environments, making possible the sharing of information -- voice, video, and data – across the world. ENG’s investment in these technologies could lead to revolutionary advances in areas such as healthcare, manufacturing, education, and commercial services.

Overall, NSF provides about 33 percent of the total Federal support for fundamental engineering research and education at U.S. universities and colleges. This sustained investment over time will lead to better-trained and educated engineers, new and emerging industrial technologies, and a more diverse engineering community.

In FY 1999 ENG will provide support for three broad themes that describe specific Foundation-wide activities. These include:

Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI): In FY 1999, ENG will support an increment of $5.0 million for KDI which includes:

• Knowledge Networking: an increase of $1.0 million to support research to address improving access to information in distributed environments for human centered learning systems, such as intelligent agents for the Internet.
• Learning and Intelligent Systems: a $1.50 million increment to support research on characterizing and adapting biological learning and adaptation mechanisms to artificial systems, and designing intelligent learning systems that can adapt to complex environments, such as sensor-based closed-loop control of manufacturing processes and systems.
• New Challenges in Computation: a $2.50 million increase to support fundamental research using multimedia and information technologies to develop test-bed applications for high-end computing in scaleable shared problem solving environments. This would include research to define design languages, interface formats and systems and controls that will enable the reliable design and manufacturing of components at remote facilities.

• Urban Communities: an increase of $2.0 million to support research on understanding and responding to stability and change within an urban environment. Research topics include: collection and integration of in situ long term performance data; life cycle analysis and sustainability of urban systems; predictive models and intervention strategies for integrated urban systems; and understanding and responding to major technological changes.
• Environmental Technologies/Engineered Systems: an increment of $4.0 million to support research focused on developing materials and manufacturing processes that avoid pollution, produce effluent that is readily degraded into environmentally benign substances and convert effluent from one process into raw materials for another. Of particular interest is the development of rapid and accurate on-line sensing techniques for biological agents that could be applied in areas as diverse as food processing and safety.
• Integrated Research Challenges: an increment of $3.0 million to support research on understanding the complex interplay between short-term phenomena and longer-term trends; for example, modeling the process of deterioration of materials and structures caused by environmental effects (e.g. microorganisms, sunlight, corrosion, etc.) and using this knowledge to develop accelerated life cycle assessment techniques for facilities and structures.
• Life in Extreme Environments (LExEn): an increment of $500,000 to support research to gain an understanding how extremeophiles could be used productively; for example, reducing the biological deterioration of engineered systems and using biological agents to improve the performance of such systems.

• Integration of research and education: an increment of $8.65 million which includes support for an ENG initiative for individual researchers and research groups to promote enhanced linkages between research and education.
• Learning technologies: an increment of $2.0 million which includes support for the new Education and Training Technologies partnership with the Department of Education.

Key Program Functions

ENG supports its ongoing and new activities through the following key program functions:

More than 90 percent of the ENG budget is used to provide grants to individuals, small groups, and centers of researchers focused across many engineering fields. About 2,800 awards are made each year, with an average (annualized) award size of about $80,000, and a duration of about 2.0 years. The increasing complexity of engineering systems is reducing the fraction of research problems that can be meaningfully addressed by the old model of an engineering professor and graduate students working in semi-isolation. A growing number of the research projects supported by ENG are conducted by small groups of engineering researchers and students working across traditional disciplinary boundaries. These collaborations expose undergraduate and graduate students to a team-oriented approach in research.

In FY 1999, Research Project Support increases by $35.96 million to $359.72 million The increase enables ENG to implement efforts to address long-standing concerns about grant sizes by increasing the average size and the duration of the awards and providing more support for researchers, with particular attention to new investigators. These efforts will also contribute to increasing the efficiency of the Foundation's merit review process and achieving greater cost-effectiveness for both NSF and the university community.

ENG will also expand support for cross-disciplinary research focused on cutting-edge technologies including:

• Nanotechnology: This research thrust focuses on the control of properties at the atomic/molecular level, their assembly into nanostructured materials, and utilizing the improved materials as building blocks for engineering applications, such as thin films and coatings, advanced chemical catalysts, artificial biomaterials, and novel optoelectronic devices. Increased funding of $3.0 million, over a base of about $20.0 million in FY 1998, will permit investigations of new concepts and methods for the generation of functional nanostructures and the fabrication of nanostructured materials, components and devices with unusual properties.
• implants, artificial tissues and organs, and novel biosensors. It also covers research on the integration of sensor-based systems and biological systems to develop devices, such as an artificial retina and other prosthetics, that are controlled by human neural systems. An increase of $3.0 million, over a base of about $25.0 million, will be used for research to improve understanding of the design principles of biological materials and processes.

 

• A total of $36.60 million, the same level as FY 1998, will be invested in the early development of academic faculty. This will be implemented largely through the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program, which supports junior faculty within the context of their overall career development and combines the integrated support of quality research and education.
• Increased funding of $1.75 million, to about $20.55 million in FY 1999, for the Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison (GOALI) program. GOALI facilitates the exchange of university and industry personnel by supporting a balanced spectrum of collaboration, ranging from visits to full-scale cooperative projects.
• Increased support of $900,000, to a total of $6.50 million, for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, to involve 200 additional students in research activities. Through this experience the students gain an appreciation for both academic and industrial research plus motivation to pursue graduate studies.
• $2.0 million to finance the new Education and Training Technologies partnership, a joint program with the Department of Education that focuses on enhancing educational technologies at the K-12 level.

Research Project Support also includes funding for the university-based centers indicated in the table below. These centers share several important characteristics: a unifying cross-disciplinary and systems- oriented focus on complex engineering problems, an emphasis on partnerships and knowledge transfer linkages with industry, and significant educational and outreach programs aimed at integrating education and research. They provide an infrastructure that underpins each of the cutting-edge technologies cited above as well as many others.

The FY 1999 Budget Request includes:

• $6.0 million to support three earthquake engineering research centers at $2.0 million per year each to: provide knowledge to mitigate damage to the built environment; provide outreach to the private, educational and government sectors; and educate professionals for cross-disciplinary careers. Total ENG support for the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction program (NEHRP) is about $19 million.
• A total of $55.80 million, an increase of $3.24 million over FY 1998, to support 22-24 university-based Engineering Research Centers (ERC). The ERCs provide an alternative educational culture where students work in cross-disciplinary teams, in collaboration with industry, and to address engineering systems issues. These centers involve partnerships with 700 firms. NSF provides 27% of the total support to the centers, with the other support coming from industry, other Federal agencies, the universities, and the states. In FY 1999, support for four centers will be terminated and four to six new centers will be established. One or two of these new centers will be focused on advancing teaching/learning technology and model curricula in challenging fields of engineering, such as the emerging field of bioengineering and the more traditional field of civil infrastructure systems.
• $6.8 million, a $940,000 decrease, for the Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC). This support reflects an increase in support for the traditional I/UCRCs of $810,000, offset by a planned decrease in support for the State I/UCRCs. The program as a whole will support 45 traditional I/UCRCs and six State I/UCRCs in FY 1999. These highly leveraged centers form close-knit partnerships with their industrial members. For example, in 1996 - 1997 faculty in 75 universities across the country worked with 750 firms on projects which are highly relevant to their industrial partners' needs. The increase in support for the traditional I/UCRCs will provide funding for projects, which link different centers' research. A growing feature of this program is the creation of multi-university centers, which provide industry access to researchers in a small cluster of universities across the country.

 ENG continues to coordinate NSF support for the National Nanofabrication Users Network (NNUN), a network of five university user facilities that offer advanced nano- and micro-fabrication capabilities to researchers in all fields. These facilities enable users to turn creative ideas into experimental reality by providing access, either on-site or electronically, to advanced lithographic, etching, deposition and growth processes, together with the expertise needed to fabricate nanometer-scale structures, custom devices and circuits. So far, the NNUN has provided state-of-the-art nanofabrication user facilities for over 1000 researchers from some 29 states and 7 countries, with increased emphasis in serving the fields of biology and biomedical engineering.

In FY 1999 ENG will provide $2.80 million to the NNUN, an increase of $400,000. The increase will permit the addition of a sixth site to the Network to increase its capability and geographic diversity.

Education and Training

In a world that is increasingly complex, there is a great challenge to educate engineers who are able to assume broad leadership roles in industry and society. Future engineers must be able to work effectively in complex, team-oriented, interconnected environments; hence, a much more integrative and holistic approach to curriculum and course design is needed. As part of NSF’s broad theme of Educating for the Future (EFF), ENG has a multi-faceted strategy to stimulate and enable such reform.

Support for Education and Training is $34.42 million, increased by $6.05 million from FY 1998. It provides for the following:

• $24.88 million for Systemic Engineering Education Reform, an increase of $1.55 million. A key element in improving the quality of engineering education involves ENG’s efforts to catalyze the academic community to reform the engineering curriculum. In FY 1999, ENG plans to continue funding of the existing Engineering Education Coalitions but with special attention to institutionalizing successful educational innovations. Plans also include supporting fresh approaches aimed at broadening graduate education and enabling greater inter-institutional communication and sharing of systemic reform approaches for undergraduate education.
• $3.0 million for a new initiative to support engineering investigators to pursue the integration of education and research (for example, student projects, course and curriculum development, etc.) through supplements to individual and group research grants.
• $4.40 million for graduate fellowships and traineeships, including:
• $ 2.0 million, an increase of $1.0 million, to support the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Program. IGERT reflects an emphasis on multidisciplinary training in all areas of NSF-supported research.
• $2.40 million, unchanged from FY 1998, to provide fellowships for graduate students, especially women, to pursue doctoral studies in engineering.

A total of $2.14 million to support NSF-wide efforts, including $500,000 for Collaboratories for Integrating Research and Education (CIRE). CIRE is a jointly funded program with the EHR activity to establish long-term research and education relationships between minority-serving institutions and NSF-supported centers and facilities.

Administration and Management

The administration and management key program function includes the cost of Intergovernmental Personnel Act appointments and contractors performing administrative functions.