NCED - Visitor Program Summary

Summary
National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED) is firmly committed to the belief that best way to accomplish knowledge and technology transfer is to provide a hands-on model by which visitors from the wider Earth-surface science community can work on topics of their own conception and initiation, motivated by NCED’s broad vision across the boundaries of geomorphology, sedimentary geology, geophysics, hydrology, biology, sediment transport, engineering, and environmental fluid dynamics. The NCED Visitor Program formalizes this hands-on mode of knowledge and technology transfer.

The goals of NCED’s Visitor Program are:

To provide access to NCED’s unique facilities, and its interdisciplinary approach, to scientists from the wider research community;
To expose NCED PIs and students to research efforts in the wider community; and
To seed additional research in support of NCED’s mission.

Each year, NCED awards up to six grants to support researchers from other institutions to work at any of NCED’s facilities. Each grant averages $24,000 and provides for participants’ per diem and travel expenses, research supplies, as well as time for technicians, machinists, and other support. The PIs and senior personnel at SAFL supply time for these visitors as an in-kind contribution. The Visitor Program does not cover salary for the visitors. While it is expected that most grants under this program would be experimental in nature, those with theoretical, numerical, and field aspects are also considered for funding. the first three years, all of the visitors housed their work at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL) where a welldeveloped infrastructure and excellent technical support for experimental research was already in place. In the years to come, requests for the other experimental facilities of NCED (the MIT Experimental Sedimentology and Geomorphology laboratories, the University of Illinois Ven te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory, the Johns Hopkins University Erosion and Sedimentation laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley Richmond Field Station and Angelo Coast Range Reserve; see Facilities and Field Sites for details of those facilities) will be entertained.

Proposals are reviewed by the NCED Executive Committee and projects are selected in terms of: the quality of the proposal, the relevance of the proposed work to NCED’s research priorities, the likelihood of success of the proposed project within the time and resource constraints, the interest of NCED PIs to commit their time to serve as mentors and liaison with NCED, the potential for training students, the potential for increasing participation of underrepresented groups, and the potential for providing leverage for future successes by the proposing researchers. Researchers who participate in the NCED Visitor Program gain a positive exposure to the power of physical models; form strong research-based relationships with NCED faculty, students and other visiting researchers; are exposed to the interdisciplinary research of the Center and its education and knowledge transfer activities; and generate high quality data that can be used to advance their own research and also support their future research plans and proposals.

The NCED Visitor Program is a vibrant research program that has provided, between 2002-2005, 16 research groups with the opportunity for conducting new and innovative research, developing new research-based relationships, and generating new understanding about earth-surface processes. The success is realized in the timely completion of projects, the continued involvement by many of the visitors with NCED’s research, education and knowledge transfer programs; and the publication and presentation of research that would not have happened without this program. The report linked above summarizes the funded projects and the program successes in terms of well-established community-wide cooperative relationships in research, education and diversity that have enhanced both NCED and the earth-surface community as a whole.