After being out of the office last week I was playing catchup through Wednesday, when I had to go back down to DC. The reason was to participate in a roundtable at NSF - tasked with defining research priorities in sustainable development. This was led by the Earth Institute - in particular by John Mutter and Jeff Sachs - but the attendees were (by design) predominantly non-CU, including luminaries like Bill Clark from Harvard and Steve Schneider from Stanford. The
goal was to make the case that at the heart of sustainable development is a set of hard-core researchable basic research questions. There was superb discussion at a very high level - but the determination of success will depend on how good a job we can do of writing up the report - and there is a short fuse on this because to have maximum impact we want to get the report into the system prior to a high-level retreat of NSF upper management scheduled for April.
I managed to escape from Washington lunchtime on Friday, so I could make it back to Lamont in time for the colloquium.
Please remember our Geosciences and Microbiology mini-symposium on Monday - Monell auditorium at 1:30 pm and with the keynote (Bo Joergensen, Director of the new Max Planck Institut for Marine Microbiology) at 4pm.
Have a great weekend.
Mike