Lamont Weekly Report – January 20, 2006

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR
P.O. Box 1000, 61 Route 9W Palisades, New York 10964

<> REPORT SUMMARY <>

- Letter from the Director

____________________________________

<> LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR


Thanks again to Dick Greco for keeping the Campus functional (at least as much as possible) during the 8 hour long power outage caused
by the wind storm on Wednesday. We got the power back at around 7:15 pm that evening after burning up $1800 worth of fuel in the backup
generators. We are very aware that not every building on campus is blessed with backup power - we are steadily trying to rectify that -
but it is an expensive process.

I had an important meeting with Beth Israel (Head of CU Office of Projects and Grants) on Thursday afternoon - she briefed me on CU's
plans to carry out a major reorganization of the proposal handling process. Info-Ed is a word that you will hearing a lot about in
the coming months - it is the name of the software company that is supplying CU with its new electronic proposal handling system. We
will be starting the training process here as soon as we can - and at some level, this will involve us all. There is an ambitious schedule
planned for implementation (inside 18 months), but the goal is to implement a completely electronic system that will, in the long term,
substantially decrease work loads. Given that we submit 500 proposals each year, this is an important issue for us, especially
so, as NSF will be phasing out Fastlane as Grants.gov becomes the standard for all agencies.

On Sunday Sarah Huard and I go to Seattle to meet with an important and generous donor for Lamont: Jerome Paros, founder and head of
Paroscientific Inc. which has given us $550K to match the similarly sized gift received from PGI a few years ago, thus allowing us to
endow our planned Technology Innovation Center that will be charged with reinvigorating technology and instrumentation development here
at Lamont. Given that so much Federal funding will be directed at the development of ocean observing systems over the next decade it is
essential that we improve our competitiveness in this arena. Arnold Gordon will be the founding Director of this activity and he will be gearing

up his steering group in the coming months to plan how best to structure this activity and use these new resources to benefit all
aspects of the Observatory's technology development needs.

Have a great weekend,



- Mike




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