NSF’s new plan to fund graduate students to work in industry covers familiar ground

From ScienceMag:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) last month gave $47 million to a nonprofit group to run what the agency called a “groundbreaking pilot” initiative that will allow 250 doctoral students to spend a year in an industrial lab. In a 29 July press release, NSF officials said the I-PhD program addresses a pressing problem in the scientific workforce: Although some two-thirds of newly minted U.S. Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math fields say they expect to work in industry, few have spent any time outside academia before they graduate.

But an existing NSF program, called INTERN, has already given more than 2000 Ph.D. students a chance to test those waters. So why the snub of a much larger program with the same goal, on which NSF has spent $66 million since 2020? The answer, according to President Donald Trump’s administration, is that I-PhD fits its vision of training the next generation of U.S. scientists and engineers through corporate partnerships rather than by NSF’s traditional approach of giving grants to individual faculty members.

The I-PhD award went to the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), a South Carolina consortium that pursues topics of interest to both sectors, such as workforce training. To be eligible for I-PhD, companies must agree to spend $100,000 on each student they take on, and universities must fund the student’s first year of graduate school before the program pays them an annual $37,000 stipend and expenses for 3 years that include 1 year in a company lab.

Companies and universities team up before applying to the program, which requires them to also provide mentoring, networking opportunities, and other perks aimed at enhancing the student’s time spent in industry.

“Companies are looking for a bigger return on investment” when they host an intern, says Tony Boccanfuso, UIDP’s executive director. “This program is set up to support a relationship between a company and a university,” he adds, and getting NSF funding “gives us the opportunity to create a new pathway that we think the marketplace may be interested in.”

Industry buy-in is a central pillar of the Trump administration’s research strategy, with corporate partnerships seen as an ideal way to leverage federal investments. In his recent report to Trump envisioning “a golden age of American science,” presidential science adviser Michael Kratsios called for more industry co-funding of “hands-on technical training at all levels.” The I-PhD initiative, Kratsios declared in the NSF press release, shows that “we are already delivering” on that report.

Making large awards to “nonlegacy institutions” like UIDP is another administration priority. The 5-year, $47 million award to UIDP for I-PhD, for example, is 100 times larger than its previous NSF grants for workshops and conferences. Historically, such large grants typically go to major research universities.

In contrast, INTERN reflects NSF’s traditional, bottom-up way of doing business. Launched a decade ago with little fanfare, INTERN gives academic scientists with an existing NSF grant a supplement of up to $55,000 that pays the salary of a graduate student to spend up to 6 months at a company or government lab. The faculty member does the matchmaking, identifying an interested company relevant to the student’s dissertation topic.

Sanghyun Lee, a computational mathematician at Florida State University, has received INTERN awards allowing two of his students to spend a summer at the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. “I used my connections” to find a collaborator, he says. “It was a lot of work to make all the arrangements, but the students loved it, and they learned a lot.”

Pancy Lwin-Munger, who was a 2021 INTERN while earning her Ph.D. in mathematical modeling at the Rochester Institute of Technology, says the program nudged her in a new direction. Working with Barbara Jones at IBM’s Almaden campus in California on modeling antiviral treatments during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic spurred an interest in public health. Lwin-Munger is now completing a postdoc in computational biology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and hopes to find a health-related job in academia or industry where she can apply her training.

INTERN “was a life-changing experience,” she says. “Growing up in Myanmar, I never would have imagined having the chance to work with a legend like Dr. Jones.”

UIDP is still signing up and vetting applications for I-PhD from industry-academic teams, and Boccanfuso doesn’t expect most students to begin working in company labs until next summer. Then it will take several years to evaluate the impact of the program.

Lee says he’s glad to see that I-PhD requires a bigger commitment from industry. But now that NSF is funding I-PhD, he is worried the agency, faced with a shrinking budget, may turn its back on INTERN. That would be a loss, he says: INTERN pays better and it’s open to a larger pool of students.

The initial signs aren’t good, Lee says. This spring, reviewers gave high marks to his application to support a third graduate student through an INTERN supplemental award. But he was told it won’t be funded because, like all of NSF’s core disciplinary programs, computational math has taken a big budget hit this year.

“They said there will be no INTERN awards this year because all the money has already been allocated,” Lee explains.

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