The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$6.87 billion (fiscal year 2010), the NSF funds approximately 20% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.
The NSF's director, deputy director, and the 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB) are appointed by the President of the United States, and confirmed by the United States Senate. The director and deputy director are responsible for administration, planning, budgeting and day-to-day operations of the foundation, while the NSB meets six times a year to establish its overall policies.
Read more about National Science Foundation: Grants and The Merit Review Process, Scope and Organization, History and Mission, Public Attitudes and Understanding
Famous quotes containing the words national science, national, science and/or foundation:
“There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; anything that is national is not scientific.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the “tough guy;” today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But I hate things all fiction ... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric—and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.”
—GGeorge Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)