David Guston - US grants

The problem of marrying expert knowledge to authoritative political decision making is ancient but continually vexing. A tradition of scholarship in describing and legitimating technical-advisory and assessment institutions has not significantly improved upon the conventional wisdom to-keep experts `on tap, not on top.` However, the recent joining of a constructivist understanding of-science to traditional concerns of expertise has led to a provocative prescription for the pursuit of what-have been called `serviceable truths.` These are truths that contain both scientific and political elements that allow parties to a dispute to achieve a workable concensus. The proposed research: 1) identifies a set of strategies to-create serviceable truths; 2) seeks empirical examples of these strategies; 3) evaluates their use; and 4)-elaborates and probes hypotheses about their use and impact.- The strategies derive from a critique of current-approaches and preliminary empirical work.- Cases are selected so as to include strategies deployed by decision makers in political institutions and those in technical institutions. They are further symmetric in that one case in each type of institution will include one-`pure` strategy, which subordinates concerns from outside the institution, and one `mixed` strategy, which-attempts to blend concerns relevant to both political and technical institutions. Preliminary research has-identified one empirical case with each strategy and has evaluated the strategies as analytical constructs,-but not as empirical strategies.- The proposed research focuses on providing additional analytic support to these strategies,-consulting literature in political decision making, science studies, and elsewhere. More importantly-it will conduct detailed empirical work, primarily elite interviews, in the cases already identified and, where-relevant, add additional cases. It will further appraise the strategies critically in the context in which-decision makers deployed them, in an effort to evaluate whether their success in context comports with predictions about their adequacy, value, effectiveness and legitimacy.- This research will not only extend a tradition of scholarship about the making of technically-complex political decisions by elaborating the concept of the `serviceable truths` into a set of decision-making strategies but, through an explicit dissemination plan, it will also provide helpful guidance to-decision makers in both political and technical institutions who seek to resolve problems at the-boundaries of politics and science.-

A symposium gathers together outstanding scholars, analysts, and practitioners in science and technology policy who are within seven years of their PhDs. It provides an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas and to present their work to a high-level (senior) audience. This research symposium is oriented toward eight theme tracks in science and technology policy:
New history of science and technology policy.
R&D program analysis and evaluation
Expertise, advice, assessment, and evaluation
Science, technology, and human needs and values
Science, technology, and international issues
Science education, human resources, and workforce
Science and technology policy institutions and processes
Science, technology, and the public.
Proposals for these tracks were broadly solicited and peer reviewed for acceptance. Accepted authors were funded to attend the workshop held in Washington, DC. Senior scholars and practitioners served as discussants. The new scholarship presented and the interaction among academics and practitioners have the potential to improve policy and programs and to benefit education in science and technology policy in a variety of ways. An edited book containing the presented papers will be published.

This project investigates the public value or societal outcomes of the research funded by social policy agencies of the US federal government such as the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor, and some human services agencies within Health and Human Services. This research studies agencies in Justice and Human Services. The research sponsored by social policy agencies constitutes a significant sum, and it includes a wide array of disciplines and a great share of the social science research the federal government funds. Studying this research will broaden the scholarship of public R&D management beyond such traditional agencies as NIH and NSF, facilitating the comparative study of techniques including merit review and technology transfer. Moreover, the study may illuminate mechanisms for producing public value from research and thus contribute to understanding the relationship between sponsored research and societal outcomes more broadly. Examining the "public value" of social policy research means studying the societal outcomes of the research and the hypothesized causal links between mission-related research programs and these outcomes. The study begins by scrutinizing public articulations of the goals and objectives for the research and continues by analyzing the procedural and logical connections between them and identifiable societal outcomes. Sources for the articulation of goals and objectives include authorizing legislation, mission statements, and strategic plans. Societal outcomes include available, systematic social indicators, as well as ad hoc indicators that policy makers and stakeholders have used in articulating the societal problem triggering the need for the research program. Although the agencies' responses to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) will be an important resource, the researchers will not focus on evaluating that Act's impact, per se, on the agencies or their research. Rather, they will concentrate on asking how social policy agencies set priorities between current programs and investing in research, how they manage research for societal outcomes, how they transfer new knowledge and/or technologies from their sponsored research into the pursuit of their missions, how they anticipate the linkages between their research and societal outcomes, and what those outcomes may be. The research will thus progress by a combination of documentary review and elite, semi-structured interviews of agency personnel and grant recipients, as well as of members of target and user communities. Many of the agencies studied have a disproportionate impact on minority and disadvantaged groups, and the method of study includes target, user, and client communities as respondents.

The research funded by this proposal will continue research previously funded by NSF at the pilot level. It will complete the inquiry into research sponsored by the human services agencies of HHS and begin and, it is hoped, complete the inquiry into the National Institute of Justice at the Department of Justice. The team will train two graduate students and, besides publication in scholarly journals, research findings will supplement teaching in several graduate courses in the public policy program at the Principal Investigator's institution.

The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) helps ensure "that advances in nanotechnology bring about improvements in the quality of life for all Americans" (PL 108-153). The Center's vision is that research into the societal aspects of nanoscale science and engineering (NSE), carried out in close collaboration with NSE scientists and combined with public engagement, will improve deliberation and decision making about NSE. CNS-ASU builds the capacity to address the societal implications of NSE by creating a broad institutional network, instituting a coherent research program, promoting innovative educational opportunities, and engaging in meaningful participation and outreach activities, especially with under-represented communities. Its goal is nothing less than charting a path toward new ways of organizing the production of knowledge and developing and testing new processes of anticipatory governance to meet the emerging promises and challenges of NSE.

CNS-ASU joins Arizona State University with the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and other universities, individuals, and groups in the academic and private sector, as well as the International Nanotechnology and Society Network (www.nanoandsociety.org) that ASU is developing. At ASU, the project's two guiding organizations are the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (www.cspo.org), which provides an institutional home for science and technology policy scholarship and engagement, and the Biodesign Institute (www.biodesign.org), which provides a substrate of NSE research and a test bed for interdisciplinary collaboration.

CNS-ASU will implement a program of research and engagement called "real-time technology assessment" (RTTA), which consists of four methods of inquiry: mapping the research dynamics of the NSE enterprise and its anticipated societal outcomes; monitoring the changing values of the public and of researchers regarding NSE; engaging researchers and various publics in deliberative and participatory forums; and reflexively assessing the impact of the information and experiences generated by its activities on the values held and choices made by the NSE researchers in its network. Through RTTA, CNS-ASU will probe the hypothesis that trajectories of NSE innovation can be steered toward socially desirable goals, and away from undesirable ones, by introducing a greater capacity for reflexiveness - that is, social learning that can expand the range of conscious choice - into knowledge-producing institutions. It organizes the research around two broad NSE-in-society themes: freedom, privacy, and security; and human identity, enhancement, and biology.

The Center's educational and training plan includes innovations at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral level that encourage interdisciplinary opportunities among NSE students and social science and humanities students. Partnerships with proven programs, including the Hispanic Research Center (www.asu.edu/clas/hrc) and the Center for Ubiquitous Computing (http://cubic.asu.edu), ensure recruitment and retention of students from under-represented groups. A collaboration with the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology (http://cresmet.asu.edu), CNS-ASU generates training modules for high school teachers in NSE-in-society.

Designed as a "boundary organization" at the interface of science and society, CNS-ASU provides an operational model for a new way to organize research through improved contextual awareness, which can signal emerging problems, enable anticipatory governance, and guide trajectories of NSE knowledge and innovation toward socially desirable outcomes, and away from undesirable ones. In pursuit of this broadest impact, CNS-ASU trains a cadre of interdisciplinary researchers to engage the complex societal implications of NSE; catalyzes more diverse, comprehensive, and adventurous interactions among a wide variety of publics potentially interested in and affected by NSE; and creates new levels of awareness about NSE-in-society among decision makers ranging from consumers to scientists to high level policy makers.

This EAGER proposal funded by the Science, Technology and Society Program supports a workshop on science policy for younger scholars. The workshop reflects an awareness that complex problems of science, technology, and society are conspicuously, perhaps uniquely, apparent in national politics today. Yet there is an absence of a community of science policy scholars who can span the terrains of intellectual inquiry and real-world practice to contribute to public deliberation and democratic decision making on these problems. A national competition is conducted to identify members of the next generation of leaders of science and technology policy. Successful applicants are brought together for a workshop, hosted by Arizona State University?s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes, aimed at helping them advance their careers, promote their ideas, develop new ideas and collaborations, develop their capabilities as public intellectuals, and catalyze their participation in an emergent network of potential science and technology policy leaders.

Science and technology policies in many nations are placing new pressures on laboratories to address broader societal dimensions of their work in ways that have the potential to influence the content of science and engineering activities. Despite longstanding calls for collaborations between natural and human scientists to achieve this goal, neither the capacity of laboratories to respond to such pressures nor the role that interdisciplinary collaborations may play in enhancing responsiveness is well understood or empirically supported. It is crucial to overcome these limitations in order to design, implement, and assess effective programs aimed at responsible innovation.

This project co-funded by Science, Technology & Society; Biology and Society; Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Society; Science of Science and Innovation Policy; and Office of International Science and Engineering involves a coordinated set of twenty laboratory engagement studies to assess and compare the varying pressures on and capacities for laboratories to integrate broader societal considerations into their work. Ten doctoral students each conduct two paired laboratory studies that extend more traditional ethnographies by engaging researchers in semi-structured interactions designed to enhance reflection upon research decisions in light of broader considerations.

The objectives of the STIR project as a whole, as well as each paired study, are: to identify and compare external expectations and demands for laboratories to engage in responsible innovation; assess and compare the current responsiveness of laboratory practices to these pressures; and investigate and compare how interdisciplinary collaborations may assist in elucidating, enhancing, or stimulating responsiveness.

Students base their studies on a protocol developed by PI Fisher during a previous thirty-three month laboratory engagement study. This study provides preliminary evidence that such activities as proposed here enable laboratory work to become more sensitive to its potential societal implications, without compromising laboratory research, education, or strategic goals. The STIR project investigates whether these results are applicable across a diverse and globally distributed range of labs and in a less time and labor-intensive manner.

The Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU) is a Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). It implements an agenda of "real-time technology assessment" (RTTA) and clusters of thematic research in pursuit of a strategic vision of the "anticipatory governance" of nanotechnologies. The RTTA agenda comprises research programs in: 1) research and innovation systems assessment, which aims to map nano-scale science and engineering research activities using bibliometrics and patent analysis; 2) public opinion and values, which aims to understand the dynamics of public and expert opinion regarding emerging nanotechnologies; 3) anticipation and deliberation, which aims at deploying novel demonstrations of scenario development and public engagement activities to anticipate societal dimensions of emerging nanotechnologies; and 4) reflexivity and integration, which aims to bolster the ability of nano-scale science and engineering researchers to understand their own roles in responsible innovation through integrating social science and humanities with natural science and engineering. CNS-ASU's two clusters of thematic research are: equity, equality and responsibility; and (beginning in Oct 2010) urban design, materials, and the built environment ("nano and the city"). To achieve its strategic vision, CNS-ASU unifies these research programs not only across several universities but also across three critical, component activities: foresight (of plausible future scenarios), integration (of social science and humanities research with nano-scale science and engineering), and engagement (of publics in deliberations). CNS-ASU also performs educational and training activities as well as public outreach and informal science education.

Arizona State University is conducting a May 2010 two-day workshop that will bring together "Next Generation" (NextGen) science communicators (writers, journalists, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, museum professionals); NextGen scholars/researchers in science and technology policy; and publication editors. The goals are: to help improve the communications skills of these professionals, to encourage collaborations of communicators and scholars, and, ultimately, to help the public gain a better understanding of the policy dimensions of STEM by encouraging more effective communications about STEM and policy issues that affect their lives.

The workshop provides direct experience in a writing genre called "narrative nonfiction" or "creative nonfiction," a domain in which Gutkind has been a leader. The co-PI, Guston, is a scholar in science and technology policy and an active partner of the NSF-funded Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network. In addition, the Spring 2011 issue of Issues in Science and Technology will include works by the collaborating communicators/scholars. This workshop precedes and informs a larger conference on science policy, "The Rightful Place of Science?," funded by others, including NSF's Science, Technology, and Society program (http://www.cspo.org/conference2010/).

Abstract
Collaborative Proposals: 1235693/1235706
Guston, David H. /

Intellectual Merit: The workshop will help move nanotechnology EHS research forward in order to more quickly assess the possible impacts of nanomaterials on health and the environment by characterizing the materials in question.

A series of background papers will address such topics as:

1. To what extent can we identify complex engineered nanomaterials (CENMs) and their trajectories in existing nano literature, patents, and products?

2. What do we know about the materials that are being or might be used for CENMs, in terms of current and anticipated functions, characterizations, toxicological properties, and life-cycle knowledge?

3. How do current leading scientific researchers understand the medium-term future development, applications and governing issues of CENMs that constitute the primary focus of this group?

4. What do we know about the ability of current regulatory science and regulatory policy pathways (knowledge systems including standards of evidence, decision support, etc.) to manage CENMs?

5. To what extent can we anticipate current approaches to predictive toxicology for nanomaterials to apply to CENMs?

Broader Impact:

The workshop on the anticipatory governance of CENMs will take fulladvantage of the dissemination abilities of the centers and groups involved. Background papers and the draft report will be available on the websites of the centers and notice of their availability sent to their multiple listservs with thousands of subscribers. After revisions from the workshop vetting, the background papers and the workshop report will be suitable for submission to journals such as Journal of Nanoparticle Research or Nature Nanotechnology. The executive committee may also arrange a briefing for the broader nano community following the publication of the papers. The inclusion of public and private sector participants in the workshop means that any perspectives and/or recommendations derived there are more likely to find receptive audiences.

The goals of this workshops project are: (1) to provide collaborative professional development opportunities for 24 early professional social science researchers, and science writers and communicators, and (2) to foster a stronger and durable "community of practice" between the fields of science policy research and science communications for the purposes of helping the general public better understand and become engaged with major issues of science and innovation policy. In addition to the PI and co-PI, involved in the work will be: twelve science policy scholars and twelve science communications professionals (writers, bloggers, museum educators, and others); mentors; editors of major science publications; several guest observers from university writing programs around the country; and graduate students who will help document and video record the activities.

Project activities include a suite of opportunities: two, four-day workshops; mentorship support; publication in hard copy and online of their articles in a special edition of Creative Nonfiction magazine; and public engagement experiences at Science Cafes around the country. These workshops and accompanying activities will continue to develop a strong foundation for the establishment of nascent collaborations of science policy scholars, science communicators, and informal science education professionals, whose partnerships should position them better to inform and engage the public on important science policy issues of our times.

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award focuses on the energy transition from the current fossil-fuel-based economy to one where solar energy harvested by means of photovoltaics, solar-thermal, and photosynthesis-driven bioenergy approaches will become a keystone in global human energy use. Scalability, efficiency and economy of these three technical solar energy conversion approaches, along with societal components such as sustainability policy and responsible energy use, will all be necessary for success. This program supports the interdisciplinary training of diverse student cohorts in multiple solar energy conversion areas at different scales, integrated with a policy and social understanding, thus educating the next generation of citizen-scientists, innovative thinkers and enlightened policy makers who can guide society toward a sustainable energy future.

Broader Impacts: In order to further enhance inclusion of students from all backgrounds, the SUN IGERT project will leverage agreements with schools and programs with significant enrollment of underrepresented groups, particularly Hispanics and Native Americans, to lower barriers for underrepresented minorities. Effective mentoring and use-inspired, application-oriented, integrative research projects will enhance retention in the program. This program will also provide the groundwork for a novel Energy Ph.D. program. Successes from our program can be emulated and adapted at other institutions nationally and globally, thus catalyzing the training of a much larger group of students who can shepherd society to a new, sustainable energy future.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to establish new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to engage students in understanding the processes by which research is translated to innovations for societal benefit.

Introduction

The goal of this project is to build research infrastructure, a virtual institute for responsible innovation. The meaning of "responsible innovation" is evolving, but roughly the term refers to a process of engagement in which stakeholders and innovators engage in mutually responsive dialogues that serve to bring about socially acceptable innovation processes and products. The proposed institute will focus specifically on nanotechnology and other emerging technologies such as synthetic biology and geo-engineering.

Intellectual Merit

The virtual institute will facilitate collaborative work on responsible innovation involving members of a coalescing community of scholars and practitioners in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Brazil and Canada. Despite divides in geography and political culture, the institute will facilitate research, training, and outreach on responsible innovation and, in doing so, it will contribute to the governance of emerging technologies under conditions dominated by high uncertainty, high stakes, and challenging societal questions that accompany novelty.

Potential Broader Impacts

The virtual institute project will accelerate work on responsible innovation, which will in turn serve to enhance connections between the considered values of the wider community and the processes of policy decisions and science and technology development. It will also contribute to the training of students and post-docs in the international, collaborative and comparative aspects of responsible innovation, and it will develop a dynamic web site and a virtual graduate course on responsible innovation to be taught across the Institute and beyond. Partnerships with public and private institutions such as US NAE, IEEE, and the Bassetti Foundation will result in wide dissemination of results to and substantive interactions with relevant stakeholder communities.

This is designated as a Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) award and is co-funded by NSF's Office of International and Integrative Activities.

This conference at Arizona State University is an early-stage activity inspired by the upcoming 2016 - 2018 bicentennial of the conception, writing and publication of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus." That book, and the dozens of films produced subsequently, have provoked questions for researchers and citizens that have endured for two centuries and are relevant today.
- How have we gone from a world in which Mary Shelley could watch public demonstrations of voltaic power on dead animals to one in which the dissection of animals in classrooms is frowned upon, but the creation of new life forms via an international synthetic biology competition (iGEM) is celebrated?
- How do literary, artistic and other cultural portrayals of science and engineering inspire and inflect STEM research?
- What steps do contemporary scientists and engineers need to take in order to proceed with their innovative activity in a responsible fashion?
- What role do lay citizens have in making decisions about science and technology?
- How can we understand the broad relationship between creativity and responsibility?

The convening brings together a USA and international group of educators in informal science education and multi-disciplinary scholars who study various aspects of the interactions of science, technology and society (STS). This team of natural and social scientists, engineers, museum professionals (Museum of Science, Boston (MOS); Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM)), artists and humanities scholars will begin to formulate plans for producing exhibits, educational programs and demonstrations, fiction and nonfiction writing contests, performances, and curricula that explore science education, ethics and artistry. An overarching goal is to establish a process that could create a national and global network of collaborators to plan programs worldwide and establish new professional collaborations of researchers beyond the bicentennial.

The workshop, a first step toward a possible larger initiative, could be significant both for the public's engagement with contemporary issues of science and society and for stimulating new inter-disciplinary research on such issues.

This award, cofunded by Systems and Synthetic Biology/MCB, Science,Technology and Society/SES, and Biotechnology, Biochemical and Biomass Engineering/CBET, will support a workshop that addresses societal issues associated with the emerging technology, synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is often defined as the design (or re-design) of biological parts, devices, and systems, toward a useful purpose. Societal questions about the governance of synthetic biology, as well as questions about its ethical dimensions and visions of its desirable futures are important projects for systematic inquiry. Societal research on synthetic biology is crucial for its responsible development.

The workshop will be held at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, AZ, 4-6 November 2014. The workshop will gather approximately 75 social scientists, humanists, scientists and engineers who are working in the area of synthetic biology and related emerging technologies. Through drafting assignments prior to the workshop, an engaging combination of plenaries, break-out activities, and ambiance at the workshop, and aggressive and varied outreach afterward, the workshop conveners will articulate, and disseminate community-generated ideas for research on the societal aspects of synthetic biology. The issues the workshop plans to explore include: biosafety and biosecurity, ethics, sustainability, DIY/makers, public opinion and values, research and innovations systems analysis, integration and reflexivity, anticipation and futures, informal science education, international and inter-agency collaboration, risk, and governance. The workshop is designed to raise and attend to other issues that emerge through discussion.

The range of contemporary "emerging" technologies with far-reaching implications for society (economic, social, ethical, etc.) is vast, encompassing such areas as bioengineering, robotics and artificial intelligence, genetics, neuro and cognitive sciences, and synthetic biology. The pace of development of these technologies is in full gear, where the need for public understanding, engagement and active participation in decision-making is great. The primary goal of this four-year project is to create, distribute and study a set of three integrated activities that involve current and enduring science-in-society themes, building on these themes as first presented in Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, which will be celebrating in 2018 the 200th anniversary of its publication in 1818. The three public deliverables are: 1) an online digital museum with active co-creation and curation of its content by the public; 2) activities kits for table-top programming; and 3) a set of Making activities. The project will also produce professional development deliverables: workshops and associated materials to increase practitioners' capacity to engage multiple and diverse publics in science-in-society issues. The initiative is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences, advancing innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments, and developing understandings of deeper learning by participants.

This project by Arizona State University and their museum and library collaborators around the country will examine the hypothesis that exposing publics to opportunities for interactive, creative, and extensive engagement within an integrated transmedia environment will foster their interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), develop their 21st century skills with digital tools, and increase their understanding, ability, and feelings of efficacy around issues in science-in-society. These three distinct yet interlocking modes of interaction provide opportunities for qualitative and quantitative, mixed-methods research on the potential of transmedia environments to increase the ability of publics to work individually and collectively to become interested in and involved with science-in-society issues.