Annual Report 2008.pdf - SAMSI

National Leadership and Involvement: SAMSI programs continue to have primarily
national leadership. Of course, these programs still have significant participation of local
scientists; indeed, one of the major strengths of SAMSI is its’ ability to draw to its
programs stellar local talent in applied mathematics, statistics, and disciplinary sciences.
The Education and Outreach program was broadened in terms of national scope, in
several ways. First, the Education and Outreach Committee was reconfigured to
strengthen the national base. We have also invited an increasing number of nonlocal
faculty to serve as mentors at the week-long undergraduate and graduate workshops. This
provides additional mentoring for participants and provides a conduit for disseminating
both the workshop concepts and scientific content back to the respective home
institutions.
Program Development: With the move to complete national leadership of programs
several years ago, we encountered the issue that program leaders were unaware of many
of the details of SAMSI operation, and hence would have difficulty with detailed
planning. We thus instituted other mechanisms to provide more hands-on guidance,
including having directorate and NAC liaisons on each program committee and
instituting regular meetings or conference calls between the program leaders, directorate,
and support staff; this is now being done for all programs.
While successful, the burden this placed on the directorate liaisons to each program has
been considerable, and we are considering mechanisms to relieve some of this burden.
One mechanism that we will try is to enhance the role of the Local Scientific Coordinator
of a program, who currently is primarily involved, during the year of program operation,
with coordinating the presence and activities of local scientists; for this, the LSC is
provided (by the partner universities) with a course release. Our plan is to also heavily
involve the LSC in the year before the program (with the universities providing a course
release for that year also) in assisting the directorate liaison with communication with the
program leaders. The LSC will, in effect, become an adjunct member of the directorate,
charged with helping the interface between the directorate and the program leaders.
Program Evaluation: Improving the SAMSI evaluation system is a never-ending
challenge. A great deal of information is gathered, including an annual survey of past
SAMSI postdocs and program participants. The information from this and the real-time
evaluation schemes is presented in Section B and Appendices C and E.
We are still in the process of obtaining a new database system, to automate maintenance
of contact information and tracking of career development of SAMSI Postdocs, new
researchers and students. We had acquired the database system used by the IMA, and
hired a consultant (the actual designer of the IMA database – he subsequently moved to
North Carolina) to modify the system to accommodate differences between SAMSI and
IMA. Unfortunately the consultant had to abandon the project for personal reasons, and
we are now exploring other options. With a much stronger administrative staff now in
place at SAMSI, however, we are in a good position to pursue alternatives.
7