Author: Stephen Sekula

Steve Sekula is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Southern Methodist University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, and currently spends most of his time either conducting research into the Higgs boson on the ATLAS Experiment or teaching. Oh, and he blogs. We all have flaws.
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Report from NUFO 2008 Annual Meeting

Cathy Knotts (SSRLUO) and Steve Sekula (SLUO) at EMSL

 (Author’s note (2008/05/20): The talks from NUFO are available online at the host lab’s website.)
NUFO, the National Users Facility Organization, is a group of user representatives from U.S. national laboratories. It’s an ever-solidifying organization whose job, at least in part, is to facilitate dialog among leaders of the user communities, share experiences of users at the labs, and to communicate the value of the scientific enterprise to all stakeholders in this enterprise. Each year, NUFO meets for two days to listen to extended presentations on the above topics and have discussions about these issues. As one of your elected SLUO Executive Committee members and in my role as an officer of the committee, I represented SLAC users at this year’s meeting.

What follows is a digested set of messages and issues that I took away from this meeting. Much of the focus of the first day were messages from Washington D.C., presented to us by government outreach experts from the Chemistry and Physics member societies (ACS and APS). In addition, there were excellent presentations about DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences (BES) perspective on users and interactions with users. We also heard from the nanoscience labs, of which there are five, first proposed in 2001 and all operating by 2006 – an undisputed record for user facilities.

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Representing YOU in Washington

This week, I am proud to co-chair (with Greg Madejski of KIPAC) the annual SLUO trip to Washington. In conjunction with our colleagues from the FNAL Users’ Group and the U.S. LHC Users’ Group, we bring a message to Washington about the importance of supporting the physical sciences through timely passage of appropriations for FY09. We also will discuss the possibility of a supplemental appropriation for this year, FY08, to undo some of the damage to our national science program and our international standing in science.

This trip, consisting of about 30 people from national and international institutions (10 from SLUO), represents hundreds of combined man-hours of preparation, training, phone calls to Capitol Hill, and deliberation over the message. The message was particularly difficult this year, given that we wanted to hit something truly concrete without inadvertantly repeating last year. In 2007, it was clear that Congress supported the physical sciences, and increasing support to them, but failed to sustain that desire in the difficult and impenetrable Omnibus appropriations process in the fall. We go with the intent of demonstrating the exciting opportunities ahead of U.S. science, particularly in particle and astrophysics, as well as emphasizing how we can easily lose these opportunities without a budget that puts us back on the rails.

I’ll be keeping my personal thoughts on the trip in my personal blog (see link under “Blogroll”), and I’ll post a more refined “executive summary” when the trip is done.