As Brad mentioned yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend the BERAC meeting this week. I had hoped to do a little live blogging but it didn’t quite work out. Instead, I thought I would share a couple of my thoughts on the meeting over the next couple of days.
Let’s start with an unnecessarily long intro to BERAC:
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the wing of the agency that programs and funds the research that matches the agency’s priorities. Here is a clip from their “about us” section:
The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, providing more than 40 percent of total funding for this vital area of national importance. It oversees – and is the principal federal funding agency of – the Nation’s research programs in high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion energy sciences.
The Office of Science manages fundamental research programs in basic energy sciences, biological and environmental sciences, and computational science. In addition, the Office of Science is the Federal Government’s largest single funder of materials and chemical sciences, and it supports unique and vital parts of U.S. research in climate change, geophysics, genomics, life sciences, and science education.
Within the Office of Science there are six interdisciplinary program offices, including
Biological and Environmental Research (BER).
Here is the BER Mission:
BER advances world-class biological and environmental research programs and scientific user facilities to support DOE’s energy, environment, and basic research missions. Mission priorities:
- Develop biofuels as a major secure national energy resource
- Understand relationships between climate change and Earth’s ecosystems, and assess options for carbon sequestration
- Predict fate and transport of subsurface contaminants
- Develop new tools to explore the interface of biological and physical sciences
Because each program is scientifically complex and deals with a lot of money (the Office of Science budget was almost $5 billion in FY 2010), the agency has set up advisory councils which meet up several times a year to talk about the state of research and how it meshes with the agency’s mission. So that is why I got to sit in on the Biological and Evironmental Research Advisory Committee (BERAC) meeting.
To be continued…
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