NSF Graduate Research Fellows Invited to Take Part in Video Contest

NSF’s oldest program turns 60 this year, and current Fellows are challenged to embrace the future with video creations

What do U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Google founder Sergey Brin and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt have in common? All received funding for their graduate education through the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

GRFP has a long history of supporting outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions.

Since 1952, NSF funded over 46,500 Graduate Research Fellowships out of more than half a million applicants. More than 30 of them became Nobel laureates, and more than 440 became members of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, NSF Graduate Fellows have a higher Ph.D. completion rate than non-Fellows.

The program is very competitive, offering fellowships to 2,000 students annually in recent years from a pool of about 12,000 applicants.

"This is NSF's signature program," said Gisele Muller-Parker, program director for the GRFP. "These students have demonstrated their potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers. Their ideas and research contribute greatly to advancing science and engineering research and innovation across all disciplines within NSF. Many later credit the support they got through this program as a keystone to their careers as scientists and engineers."

In honor of the program's 60th anniversary, NSF invites Graduate Research Fellows to take part in a video contest titled: "Creating the Future." The contest challenges Fellows to create a short video, not to exceed 90 seconds, that communicates how their NSF-funded research will help shape the future--for themselves, their field or the world.

Submissions are due Sept. 14, and winners--selected by a distinguished panel of judges, as well as by citizens at large in a "People's Choice" category--will be announced in mid-November. Contest winners will be awarded cash prizes. Details on contest rules, eligibility and submission are provided on the GRFP Video Contest webpage.

Also see a NSF special report on the GRFP's 60th anniversary.

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Build an App for a Chance at a Cash Prize

The U.S. Department of Labor invites you to build an app that helps promote the employment of people with disabilities. Visit Challenge.gov to learn more about this challenge, which runs until 11:59pm on August 23, 2012.

The following three prizes will be awarded:

1. Innovation Award, $5,000

2. The People's Choice Award, $3,000

3. Above and Beyond Accessibility Award, $2,000

Beyond Waste

The goal of the LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Challenge  is to identify ten “game changing” innovations that have the potential to transform the current waste management systems and practices to ones focused on minimizing waste and/or transforming waste into new products.

LAUNCH invites proposals for innovative design for zero waste solutions, waste elimination, waste transformation, and waste mitigation technologies, as well as waste reduction-focused education, business, and financial strategies that have the potential to reduce and/or eliminate waste at a household, community, office building, campus, or industrial level.

The Waste Hierarchy  establishes a ranking of management options in context of increasing environmental impact, and is based on the simple premise that it is better to avoid generating waste than to treat or dispose of waste.

The ultimate goal of LAUNCH is a sustainable future for planet Earth and its inhabitants. The LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Challenge seeks to identify entrepreneurial efforts focused on the development of innovative products, services, and programs that can benefit from collaborating and networking with influential government and business leaders to accelerate their deployment and adoption in both the developed and developing worlds.

This challenge, as noted above, spans the full hierarchy of waste, as well as systems and practices of various levels. LAUNCH: Beyond Waste seeks to transform “waste” from a by-product with a negative impact to a resource and asset for society. LAUNCH: Beyond Waste seeks transformational solutions to the problem of waste through disruptive innovation, behavioral change, systems design, policy, and stewardship.

LAUNCH was formed to address large, sustainability-related challenges that no single government or commercial entity can solve alone. LAUNCH searches for, showcases, and supports transformative innovations and connects LAUNCH Innovators to a collaborative and engaged group of thought leaders and experts. Most importantly, LAUNCH Innovators have the unique opportunity to accelerate their innovations for greater impact and scale by leveraging the advice, networks, and resources of this esteemed group and the global stage LAUNCH provides.

With increasing global population growth and escalating demands on the planet’s limited resources, the world needs to find ways to design for zero waste, and reduce and/or eliminate the waste left at the end of a product or a process’s full life cycle. Current practices pertaining to waste are not sustainable from economic, societal, cultural, and environmental perspectives, damaging the planet and its populations. LAUNCH: Beyond Waste is designed to address this global challenge.

Can we design and implement new models across the waste hierarchy, value chains and life cycles of products and processes to dramatically reduce waste generated in both the developing and developed worlds? Can we develop and deploy data architectures to make waste and waste streams universally visible to public and private sector actors and citizens across the globe? Can we transform the concept of waste from one of resource abandonment to a model where all elements along the waste value chain create economic, societal, cultural and/or environmental value?

Want to learn more or enter the challenge?

This Challenge will be posted and open for submissions beginning April 1, 2012 and will close May 15, 2012.

Please visit www.launch.org  to view former Innovators’ presentations and comments about their experiences at LAUNCH.

NASA Astronaut to Name Global Winners in YouTube Space Lab Contest

Joshua Buck

Headquarters, Washington

WASHINGTON -- NASA astronaut Suni Williams will announce Thursday the two winners of the YouTube Space Lab contest, a global science competition that challenges 14-18 year-old students to design a science experiment for the International Space Station. The awards ceremony will be held at 10 a.m. EDT in the Newseum's Knight Room at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. in Washington.

Thousands of individuals and teams from more than 80 countries entered the competition to have their experiment flown in space. Williams will perform the two winning YouTube Space Lab contest experiments 250 miles above Earth during the Expedition 32 and 33 missions on the space station later this year.

A team of judges, including William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA's Human Exploration Mission Directorate, and Leland Melvin, associate administrator for NASA's Office of Education and a former astronaut, selected 60 finalists. Online voting chose the final six. Gerstenmaier will introduce the finalists in the 17-18 year-old category at the awards ceremony.

Members of the media who wish to attend the ceremony can RSVP online at http://bit.ly/GzGXWx.

The 2005 NASA Authorization Act designated the U.S. segment of the space station as a national laboratory and directed NASA to develop a plan to "increase the utilization of the ISS by other Federal entities and the private sector." As the nation's newest national laboratory, the station further strengthens relationships among NASA, other Federal entities, and private sector leaders in the pursuit of national priorities for the advancement of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The International Space Station National Laboratory is opening new paths for the exploration and economic development of space. As these activities are ramping up, contests like the YouTube Space Lab are important components of an integrated strategy to inspire the next generation of explorers and scientists using the orbiting outpost.

For information about the contest and to see the proposals from the 60 finalists, visit

http://www.youtube.com/spacelab.

For information about the International Space Station, visit http://www.nasa.gov/station.

For more information about Expedition 32 and 33, visit http://go.nasa.gov/Expedition32 and http://go.nasa.gov/Expedition33.

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