June 2010

On June 3, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Subra Suresh to be Director of the National Science Foundation.

Dr Suresh is currently Dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 2000 to 2006, Dr. Suresh served as the head of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He joined MIT in 1993 as the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and since then has held joint faculty appointments in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biological Engineering, as well as the Division of Health Sciences and Technology. From 1983 to 1993, Dr. Suresh was a faculty member in the Division of Engineering at Brown University. He has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bangalore, the Royal Spanish Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World based in Trieste, Italy, and the German National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Suresh is the recipient of the 2007 European Materials Medal, the highest honor conferred by the Federation of European Materials Societies, and the 2006 Acta Materialia Gold Medal. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, an M.S. from Iowa State University, and a Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Suresh also holds honorary doctorate degrees from the Technical University of Madrid in Spain and Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

On June 2, we launched a vital new HHS Open Government effort: The Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI). Joined by almost 700 people in person and online, the Initiative was publicly launched by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius along with Deputy Secretary Bill Corr, Institute of Medicine President Harvey Fineberg, and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra at a forum held at the National Academy of Sciences.

The Community Health Data Initiative is an incredibly exciting new public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize data made publicly available by HHS to develop applications that will help raise awareness of community health performance, spark action to improve performance, and empower individuals and communities to make informed choices about their health. This initiative has its roots in a brainstorming session of public and private sector innovators held on March 11 by the Institute of Medicine and HHS. The objective of the March session was to explore what could be done with HHS's vast stores of community health data - e.g., smoking rates, obesity rates, access to healthy food, utilization of medical services, etc. If HHS made such data easily accessible by the public, would innovators be interested in developing creative new uses for it that could benefit the public? The answer was a resounding yes, so we went to work. Innovators from the worlds of business, technology, academia, and community advocacy identified many areas where exciting new applications to improve health could be developed.

Chicago public television station WTTW is cutting expenses by $3 million next year, a move that forced the public broadcaster to eliminate up to a dozen jobs. WTTW lost $1.3 million in state funding, and it anticipates a continued drop in revenue for the fiscal year that starts July 1. A WTTW spokeswoman said that the company had a $4-million shortfall in its current fiscal year and it hopes to generate at least $52 million in revenue next year. The company's WFMT-FM/98.7 radio station will not lose any staff, but will have its budget cut by $200,000. Other cost-cutting measures include trimming executive salaries by 5% for the second consecutive year and carrying the companywide salary freeze through to 2011. The employee cafeteria will also be closed.

NECA and Princeton Edge Lab released a paper of case studies, called network scenarios, to prompt an exchange of ideas about systematic approaches and the science needed for achieving the policy objectives in the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan: universal broadband availability, high adoption rates, and efficient and sustainable investment in infrastructure. The scenarios highlight the pervasiveness and importance of spillover effects where an individual participant in the broadband market can alter the efficiency and value proposition of the entire U.S. broadband network. The paper also highlights the range of further research and data collection necessary to understand critical issues such as two-sided cost recovery, usage-based pricing, and the dynamics across the divide between "pipe" providers and content providers.