Mines Magazine Turns 100 - the Timothy and Bernadette Marquez ...

Q & A with NSF director, Arden Bement ’54Interview by Nick SutcliffeArden Bement ’54 stepped down as director of the NationalScience Foundation at the end of May 2010. Appointed by PresidentGeorge W. Bush in 2004, he was the 12th director of the60-year-old agency and only the second engineer to fill thepost.Shortly before his NSF departure, Bement welcomed me intohis spacious office atop the agency’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters,where our conversation covered both the personaland the professional: he spoke on topics of national concernthat he’s addressed during his term at the NSF; he spoke abouthis own career and identified some of the strategies that havecontributed to his success; and he described some of the globalchanges he sees on the horizon for us all.Prior to joining the NSF, Bement served as director of theNational Institute of Standards and Technology for three years.During his career, he led research and engineering organizationsfor the Department of Defense; held distinguishedacademic and administrative appointments at MassachusettsInstitute for Technology and Purdue University; administeredand spearheaded research for TRW; and served as a senior scientistfor General Electric. From 1954 until 1992, he served as acommissioned officer in the U.S. Army Reserves. And for manyof these years, he was also busy on the home front, helping hisfirst wife raise their eight children.While every one of these jobs clearly came with great demandsand responsibilities, Bement, 78, says that administeringthe NSF’s multibillion-dollar budget ($7.3 billion in 2010)was one of the most challenging.One would think that leading the world’s largest sponsor offundamental science and engineering research for six yearswould provide a fitting capstone to his distinguished career, andmake retirement an appealing prospect. But Bement had nosuch plans.Rather, he was eagerly looking forward to returning to PurdueUniversity, where he’s been on a leave of absence sincebecoming director of NIST in 2001. He spoke about the GlobalPolicy Research Institute that he’s helping to establish on campus,and the institute’s mission to elevate the role of science inpolicymaking.The conversation lasted almost two hours; what follows areedited highlights of the exchange.The pace of scientific and engineering research is faster today thanever. What do you see as some key implications of this for society?It’s not only that the rate of change has increased, but the timefrom concept to application has compressed. We used to think interms of two or three decades to take a new idea and reduce it topractice. Now it can sometimes occur within a handful of years,or even a few months. This is partly because there are so manymore people thinking along the same lines and pursuing the sameresearch—they beat their ideas against each other so somehow onehas a faster convergence model than just one person thinking off ontheir own. Some problems are at the level of complexity that one personcan’t have the breadth of insight necessary to see all the nuancesand all the variables, so they are dealt with at the systems level,requiring teamwork and the sharing of insights among scientists inan interdisciplinary and a free-inquiry way. There are no set formulasfor this. It’s free-flow. Ideas are exchanged until suddenly somethingclicks, and then you can converge on a solution very quickly. That’sgoing on around the world. You might come up with a new idea, butthat doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to be the one who isgoing to capitalize on it. Someone else is probably thinking aboutit and maybe has a better approach for reducing it to a practice ofearning wealth out of it.What accomplishment are you most proud of from your time at the NSF?Establishment of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure is probably oneof the greatest achievements and one of the most important. Itclearly puts the U.S. in an undisputed leadership position when itcomes to computation. Cyberinfrastructure is an integrating forcethat can take research and education to an entirely new plane of discovery,and OCI has enhanced the capability of building networkingand high-end computational capacity at U.S. universities, includinga network that spans the country and is connected with the world. Ithas already altered our familiar research, education and innovationlandscapes; we have one petaflop-scale computer at the Universityof Illinois coming online in the next year or two. We have a Krakencomputer at Oakridge National Laboratory that is right at a petaflop.So that’s at least two that are ranked among the fastest computers inthe world. And they are all interconnected on a network with a capacityof about five and a half petaflops. So that gives the U.S. morecomputing power for universities than any other nation in the world,and we can expect much more to come.NSF’s many international collaborations involve sharing valuable informationwith international competitors. How does this improve theUnited States’ ability to compete with these same countries?At the frontiers of science and engineering, competition is moreblurred. It’s important to know how to collaborate in order to knowColorado School of Mines 27