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The Funding Agency Context for the LSST DESC Steve Kahn

The Funding Agency Context for the LSST DESC Steve Kahn. DOE-Office of High Energy Physics. Traditionally, funding for high energy physics groups at universities had been handled through 3-year “institutional grants” with multiple tasks:

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The Funding Agency Context for the LSST DESC Steve Kahn

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  1. The Funding Agency Context for the LSST DESCSteve Kahn

  2. DOE-Office of High Energy Physics • Traditionally, funding for high energy physics groups at universities had been handled through 3-year “institutional grants” with multiple tasks: • A “task” was associated with each experiment that the group is involved in. • Each task had a faculty lead, but there was one overall Principal Investigator per institution. • Except under exceptional circumstances, funding to university groups had been held roughly “level” if the reviews were positive. Money moved between tasks, but the overall total was held constant. Adding projects did not add money. • Funding was ~ $200-300K per year per full-time faculty member. • Each university had a different start and end date for the three year award. • Proposals were reviewed by mailed in reviews with site visits from DOE personnel.

  3. DOE-Office of High Energy Physics • This system has been changed dramatically within the past year: • A “competitive” review process was instituted, where all groups whose grants expired in a given year were asked to repropose at the same time. The ensemble of proposals is reviewed comparatively by a single panel. • The agency is moving toward splitting out tasks into separate proposals, with separate faculty PIs. A single institution may now have multiple PIs. • Experiments and projects are now classified into Energy, Intensity, and Cosmic Frontier areas. The total in each area is capped (roughly). • Cosmic Frontier includes dark energy, dark matter, cosmic rays, gamma rays, solar and cosmic neutrinos, etc. • Nevertheless, the rough funding guidelines per faculty member remain about the same. A single individual can move between projects, but cannot get more money by engaging in multiple projects. • There is no “new money” for LSST: • As we build up the collaboration, the funding to support it will have to come from the existing budget. • However, some experiments are winding down. So there is reason to expect that some resources will be made available – less at the beginning, more later.

  4. DOE-Office of High Energy Physics • National laboratory funding: • The labs are funded out of a different pool. Each has a “core budget” for high energy physics, which includes funding for scientist salaries, and expenses for “performing science”. • Projects (procurements, expenses, and professional labor) are paid for as separate line items. • The lab groups are reviewed in two different ways: • Fermilab has a “science and technology” review every year. ANL, BNL, LBNL, and SLAC are reviewed once every four years. • There is a competitive lab review in each of the three main areas (Energy, Cosmic, Intensity Frontiers) every three years, in which all 5 labs present to the same panel. • To a large extent, these core budgets are also held level at best. The labs do not increase their core budgets by engaging in new projects. New projects are initiated by redeploying existing scientists.

  5. DOE-Office of High Energy Physics • Proposing for LSST DESC funding: • The first cycle of competitive proposals were submitted last November. • Because the DESC did not exist, LSST-related tasks did not do especially well in the review. The panel did not have a context for evaluating the proposed contributions from individual groups. • The next cycle of proposals will be due end of August. This is the schedule that is driving the completion of the white paper. • New groups can propose in this next round. • Groups that were either cut off or underfunded in the last round can propose for “supplements” in this upcoming round.

  6. NSF Funding for LSST DESC • There is some existing NSF support for LSST related activities from both the Astronomical Sciences Division (AST) and from the Particle and Nuclear Astrophysics (PNA) piece of the Physics Division. • However, NSF has told us that future proposals will be directed to NSF-AST. • NSF-AST does not have an extensive history of supporting “collaboration proposals”. • There is no bias against such proposals within the agency. However, when such proposals have been sent out for review, they have not fared well against proposals for research using existing or soon to be acquired data. • NSF-AST has informed us that they do want to receive the white paper along with DOE. • They will attempt an evaluation of new proposals “within the context” of the white paper. • However, successful peer review will still be essential. The proposals need to make a convincing case for why funding for this activity is crucial now. • The two agencies have also assured us that they will work together to figure out how to fund the key participants in this collaboration. We are encouraged to explore all options and work with them to get what we need.

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