February, 2003
Unidata
submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation late summer, 2002 to
administer the Unidata Community Equipment Awards. In mid-January, we learned from Cliff Jacobs
that that proposal would be funded this year (FY2003) and that we should include
it as a line item in our five-year continuation proposal.
Cliff
suggested that we begin announcing this years’ awards at the AMS meeting in
February
The UPC held aside $100,000 last year from its annual NSF funding to put toward the equipment awards in FY03. Therefore, this year we have a pool of up to $200,000 for the awards. This includes overhead charged to outgoing awards. We will accept proposals between $5,000 and $25,000.
A panel of user committee members, UPC staff, and at least one outside person will convene on June 27th (at the end of the Expanding Horizons 2003 workshop) to review and make award suggestions. Award notification will begin in mid-July.
To-date we have announced the award program on our web site
(with full explanation of criteria and application directions), produced
flyers for the
UOP booth at AMS, and sent an all-community message to over 1900 community web-portal
members. We hope that this will help to invoke a good
response. The feeling among staff is
that given the number of questions we’ve had about the reinstatement of the
awards program, we should have quite a few requests this year.
Thanks to NSF (Bernard and Cliff) for continuing this important program!