This proposal supports the local costs for the foreign participants at the first meeting of the US-USSR Joint Commission for Cooperation in the field of Basic Scientific Research to be held in Washington, DC on April 19-20, 1990. Dr. Bromley, OSTP, and Dr. Nikolay Laverov, Chairman of the USSR State Committee for Science and Technology will chair the proceedings. The Joint Commission was created by the January 1989 intergovernmental Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Basic Scientific Research. That agreement, in turn, provides the framework for subordinate agency-level memoranda of understanding through which the cooperative activities are actually implemented. It is under this umbrella that the NSF signed a Memorandum of Understanding last May with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. This agreement has given us, for the first time, a direct link with the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the ability to support investigator-initiated, competitively reviewed cooperative research proposals. The Commission's main task is to review the implementation of this new cooperative program. It will discuss issues and problems, such as the difficulties of bridging barriers in the Soviet Union between the Academy and the universities, new research topics and emphases, and coordination of the global change research between the two countries. This project fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling leading researchers in the United States and the U.S.S.R. to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence in the field of basic scientific research on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit.
