AAS Informational Email 2006-17

Kevin B. Marvel, Executive Officer

Subject: Release of NSF Senior Review

The following message is being sent on behalf of Wayne Van Citters, Director of the NSF Astronomy Division.

Dear Colleagues,

This  morning Roger Blandford presented the results of the AST Senior Review to the MPS Advisory Committee here at NSF.  The committee has accepted their report and transmitted it to NSF.

The report is now available on our web site at: http://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/seniorreview/sr-report.pdf.  General information on the process and plans for the future can be found at: http://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/ast_senior_review.jsp.

I encourage you to read the report carefully. It reflects an enormous amount of work and thought on the part of the committee and represents a body of excellent advice for us at NSF and for the community as a whole.  In addition to the specific recommendations, I would like to call your attention to the Findings and the discussion in Section 7.  These deserve extensive thought and attention by all of us.

It is now our collective challenge to give careful consideration to the recommendations and findings and chart the best implementation plan that we can devise. The timescale for the development of the complete implementation plan is uncertain; we will proceed as rapidly as possible, but it will clearly take months rather than weeks. The very nature of some of the recommendations sets a timescale of several years for their implementation. We are scheduling another series of town meetings across the country to confer with you about the recommendations and about our implementation plans as they develop.  We encourage you to study the report and come and talk to us about it.

We took on the study itself as a community effort; many attended our original series of town meetings and spoke to the committee.  Hundreds of you took advantage of our e-mail account to present your views. As a community we must now continue the process in considering and acting upon the recommendations.  We look forward to hearing from all of you.


Wayne



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