The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.

The National Science Foundation Home Page

Brenda Wisnewski

http://www.nsf.gov/

You may be an engineering graduate student looking for research ideas or a professor trying to get funding for a project; however, the answer to the question, "Where can one look for research topics or for information on funding?" is the same--the new National Science Foundation (NSF) Home Page. It has been newly designed for easy and quick access for both the casual browser and the serious researcher.

The above image shows the NSF home page and I have used a flow diagram to represent the links I followed around this web.

Grants & Programs
I started my exploration by clicking on the Grants and Programs Area button. Research topics in different NSF funded programs reside here. Let's say that "Bioengineering" was the research area of choice.

1. First I clicked on the Program Areas link, where a listing of different research areas came up. Research areas ranged from Biological Sciences to Engineering to Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.
2. Then I clicked on the Engineering link, and the NSF Engineering Directorate home page came up. On this page are listed six different engineering divisions funded by NSF. There was everything from the Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovations (DMII) to the Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC). This page also gives a description of the Engineering Directorate as well as a explanation of its goals.
3. Returning to my search, I found what I was looking for under the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems (BES) link. On this page, there is a brief synopsis about the program and their goals.

Two links were listed on this page, Bioengineering Research to Aid in Persons with Disabilities and Environmental and Ocean Systems. After clicking on the Bioengineering Research to Aid Persons With Disabilities link I was able to find information concerning this topic. To get more information about the program, an address is given on the Engineering Directorate home page.

Program Deadlines
Assuming you have already found the program that you are interested in, you need to know when the deadlines are for turning in the applications. Go back to the NSF Home Page and click on the Program Deadlines button. Here the deadlines for program applications are listed; annual programs are listed by month, while continuing programs are listed by the program names only because their deadline dates vary.

News Of Interest
Another link from the NSF Home Page was News of Interest. This page lists topics that range from the NSF Strategic Plan and Statistical Reports on U.S. Science and Engineering to the NSF Budget and NSF Press Releases. Exploring this page I selected the NSF Press Releases link. This page lists recent articles about NSF research released to the press. A recent article, released on March 15th, was entitled "Electronic Archive Will Speed Scientific Exchange." It was an informative piece about an NSF project that will enable scientists to view abstracts and papers online from 25 different scientific areas of research from around the world.

Information & Publications

To locate the most recent publications published by the National Science Foundation, click on Information and Publications. Under the publications listing are the Publications Catalogue and the Publications Database (Gopher) Search. These links are for those persons seeking a certain NSF article. If you are interested in sending a proposal to NSF, the Grant Proposal Guide is the link you want. Included on this page are links to where you can find the NSF buildings, plus maps of the Washington, D. C. area and the Metro system.

External Links

The External Links button connects to a list of different NSF funded sites and centers. Links to the White House, National Laboratories, Federal Agencies, and NSF Research Centers are just some of the sites listed. One web site that I visited was the National Metacenter for Computational Science and Engineering. Here I found a collection of papers based on the research done using the technological resources at NSF supercomputing facilities. Using the keyword search, I typed in the word "valves" to see what would come up. There was one match; it was on the simulation of blood flow through the aortic valve in the heart. The researchers of this paper used a CRAY C90 to make their heart model contract and expand. Included on this page were colorful graphics as well as some that can be animated.

Focus Area
Returning to the NSF home page, the NSF Focus Areas button is for those people who know exactly what they are looking for. This page has links to topics under Grant/Research Opportunities, Science Trends/Statistical Information, News Media, and Science Education. For example, under the topic of Science Education are the links for Education and Human Resources Directorate, Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, and Engineering Directorate. These links quickly get you to where you want to go.

The National Science Foundation Web site is loaded with information pertaining to research in our world today. You should find that a visit to this site will be informative and helpful in trying to get ideas for research topics and funding. If you want to access the National Science Foundation site, use the URL

http://www.nsf.gov/.

HTML