Former presidential science adviser to speak on STEM R&D funding and job growth, innovation

Dr. John Marburger, who served as science adviser to former President George W. Bush, will discuss the relationship between money spent on research and development in the STEM enterprise and job growth and innovation during his keynote address at George Washington University on Wednesday.

"We need to understand the relation between inputs like research funding, scholarships, tax incentives and training programs, and outputs like job creation, productivity and GDP growth," said Marburger, who served as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2001-09. "Those high-level outputs are being measured now, but to evaluate specific policies or programs we need intermediate measures that can be assessed in the short term to let us know if we're on the right track, and to get these right, we need better understanding of the whole innovation system.

"So first we need data, and conceptual frameworks, then we can choose measures that mean something and collect or refine data on those measures."

"STEM Enterprise: Measures for Innovation and Competitiveness" is designed to assess the effectiveness of all federal, state, private and academic money spent on spent on R&D in the STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math -- enterprise. Work in this area serves as a driving force for economic and social advancement throughout the world.

The event will be at George Washington's Marvin Center on Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. On-site registration will be taken. For more on the program and additional speakers, see http://www.ieeeusa.org/calendar/conferences/stem/.

Marburger is a university professor in the departments of Physics and Electrical Engineering at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University, where he served as president from 1980-84. His tenure as the president's science advisor began soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and was the longest in history. Marburger helped to formulate major policy initiatives associated with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, re-orientation of the nation's space policy following the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the nation's re-entry in the international nuclear fusion program ITER, and the American Competitiveness Initiative that sought to double federal funding for the physical sciences and engineering.

Wednesday's event will also look at the link between STEM R&D and quality of life in the United States and abroad, a link Marburger says is poorly understood.

"There is pretty obviously a link because technology pervades everything we do, but exactly how is a very big question," he said. "As a scientist and an educator, I love it when Congress funds more research in universities -- any research. But as a policy adviser, I have to ask if we really understand what we're doing when we fund particular fields and programs at the particular levels that we do. In many cases we're just responding to, more or less, random advocacy."

Marburger thinks the U.S. STEM enterprise is so big -- the federal government alone has an R&D portfolio of $147.3 billion in FY 2009 -- that no single organization can create unbiased reports and recommendations for policymakers.

"No one entity can provide the understanding needed for rational policymaking to enhance competitiveness. You need an entire profession doing this all the time," Marburger said. "It's not a disadvantage to have multiple sources of reports and recommendations, especially when our state of knowledge about cause and effect is so weak. An unbiased report today would be one that says we don't understand how all this works. There are certainly entities like the National Academies that produce good, relatively unbiased reports. But broad policy recommendations are nearly always highly subjective and intuitive.

"The best we can do in the current environment of ignorance is to assemble groups of experts and ask their opinion. I would like to see us spend more on providing better tools for those experts, and on training professionals who can improve on these intuitive judgments."

Source: IEEE-USA