This award supports a PI meeting/workshop for enhancing NSF-funded collaborative research on the environment in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The workshop will bring together 50-60 members of the U.S. scientific community funded by NSF to work in the SSA region, 20 of their African collaborators, program officers from the various NSF programs that fund environmental research in SSA, and representatives from other agencies and groups that support related work in SSA. The meeting will be the first PI meeting to have such a regional focus and will be multidisciplinary, involving PIs with awards from several directorates representing multiple disciplines (e.g. ecology, systematics, atmospheric sciences, earth sciences, anthropology, geographic sciences, and environmental engineering). The workshop will feature poster sessions to share information about ongoing activities, plenary lectures, and working groups on scientific as well as logistical/operational themes. The Office of International Science and Engineering is sponsoring this workshop in order to strengthen NSF's existing investment in this region by promoting and facilitating multi-disciplinary collaboration, integration and synthesis of results across hierarchical levels. The workshop will also bring together PIs with experience in providing research experiences for US students in SSA, thus providing insight into how to provide more and better such opportunities. Also participating in the meeting will be a group of African scientists who collaborate with NSF PI's, thus providing information on the scientific projects that complement African strengths and interests. Another group of participants will be other agencies and foundations that fund related work in SSA, enhancing the likelihood of leveraging NSF funding, particularly in ways that strengthen human and physical capacity building in Africa and so strengthen the mutual scientific collaborations.
The main part of the workshop will be a three-day meeting convened at NSF. The workshop participants will work to identify collaborative scientific research opportunities and areas of synergy, both intellectual and operational, identify specific partnerships linked with specific mechanisms for funding, recommend mechanisms for fostering more effective collaboration, and identify mechanisms for building and maintaining research networks. One working group will focus on communication and information technology challenges faced by this community of scholars. To more effectively address this sub-topic, several IT experts will join the main workshop on its last day and remain at NSF, working with a subset of the participants on the fourth day to address the IT challenges. This group will work to recommend methods for enhancing communication that might include assembling research/personnel directories and bibliographies, addressing issues of information/data management, sharing information on IT infrastructure advances and opportunities, and the use of digital libraries to strengthen international science research and education in the US and Africa. The results of the workshop will be available in a report to be available electronically on the worldwide web, and distributed on CDs in Africa.
