My program includes about 30 grants and contracts to top scientists at well-known universities, in industry, and in Air Force laboratories. The scientific disciplines employed in this research include biochemistry, molecular biology, physiology, and neuroscience, as well as animal and human behavioral studies.
My primary duties and responsibilities include: (1) formulation of program needs and requirements; (2) informing the relevant scientific community about the opportunities available in the program; (3) encouraging submission of grant proposals; (4) evaluation and prioritization of new research investment options; and (5) selection of projects for funding.
Part of this process involves peer review. This could include setting up panels or sending the proposals out to appropriate scientists for individual reviews. I determine which method of peer review and advice is most useful to me and then I implement it. I oversee all technical, fiscal, and administrative aspects of my program. I also am responsible for defending and explaining the program to management and to scientific review boards.
I am also expected to promote and coordinate optimal information exchange between the relevant scientific community and the operational Air Force, including training and education programs, technological development, and application of research findings. Not only is it important that I encourage that these transitions take place, I must clearly document them as evidence of the usefulness of my program to the Air Force.
I regularly coordinate with my counterparts in other funding agencies to assure a research program that meets national policy objectives and avoids duplication. It is also important that I liaison with relevant scientific and technical activities both nationally and internationally, including scientific progress directly within the areas we are funding at this time, and also within related areas, and keeping abreast of progress within my general area of expertise.
How I Got Here
I finished graduate school, taught for a couple of years, completed a post-doc, and then decided that I did not want to spend the next few years getting to know more and more about less and less. I liked the intellectual searching part of research, such as coming up with the research questions to ask, and I liked writing about results and interpreting them for publication. But I hated the actual hands-on experimentation, which I found boring and frustrating.
So what should I do? This was back in the days when every scientist around me, my thesis advisor, my post-doc mentor, and my friends all thought I was crazy at best, a traitor at worst, for wanting something different. After all, I was offered a couple of very respectable academic jobs, why would I want to do anything else? It must be because I was a woman and not really serious about science.
It was a pretty unpleasant experience, coming face-to-face with such strong prejudices. I was not able to find anyone within my academic world who was willing or able to help me explore other options. Somehow, through a long chain of personal inquiries, I was contacted by an Air Force officer at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), who was looking for a temporary replacement for himself while he went off for a year at the Navy War College.
I didn't even know the Air Force funded basic research at the time. This was the early 1970s, and academe and the military were not the best of buddies. This officer managed a program of research in education and training, and he found out from the folks at the National Academy of Science that I might be interested in trying out such a position, that I was familiar with the scientific discipline critical to his program, and in fact knew several of the scientists funded through the program. I decided to try it for a year. Why not? It would at least give me a year of experience in grant administration.
So in 1979, I started an IPA (an agreement between a university and the government where the government pays your salary and the university agrees to hire you back after your stint with the government). The first day of work they put me on a military airplane and took me to Texas to listen to the three services defending their programs to AFOSR. I'll never forget my reaction when I looked at all of those number charts and realized that the numbers were in millions of dollars. That first year, Jack had already made many of the decisions about who to fund. But our boss was very curious about my opinion of these scientists, and boy, did I have opinions. It was very different talking to brilliant senior scientists as their program manager than it had been from the position of a young, adoring new Ph.D. But we were on the same side, after all, and I enjoyed every new thing I learned.
I put together my first program review of all these scientists, and I went to the annual meeting in my specialty as a very special person. AFOSR decided to offer me a permanent position. I had convinced my boss that the Air Force really needed a distinct program in visual psychophysics, which I was very capable of putting together and managing. And then I gave one of the best briefings of my life to the then-director of the organization, who said immediately after it that they should hire me fast.
And so began my career in the military. I enjoyed learning as much as I could about the Air Force and, for that matter, about the military as a whole. I started with no knowledge at all, but had freedom and support to find out all I could absorb. When I decided that there was nothing I'd like better than to go to War College, I received the support of the Command and was sent to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) for a year.
And what a year that was. The other students were Air Force, Navy, Army, and Marine officers, with a few civilians thrown in for variety. Never have I learned so much in such pleasant and stimulating surroundings. When we studied the Supreme Court, a few of the justices came in to tell us about it. Our studies of banking included visits with senior officers from the top banks in the United States. The general theme of the year was industrial mobilization for war and acquisition within the Department of Defense. These were the Reagan administration years, and the military was being built up. ICAF was a rare opportunity, one not to be missed if you ever get the chance.
After ICAF, I wanted a chance to use my new knowledge in something oriented more toward Air Force than toward a basic research organization, so I took a staff management position at Headquarters, Air Force System Command, as Program Manager in the Directorate of Life Sciences of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. I became the headquarters representative for all applied research in the area of human systems. In this post, I planned, initiated, developed, and managed programs of basic research in education and training, human visual information processing, artificial intelligence/image understanding, and neuroscience. Each program included 20 to 30 contracts and grants to universities and industries. I formulated program needs, evaluated research proposals, and selected projects for funding and then I oversaw all technical, fiscal, and administrative aspects of the research programs. I defended the programs though the 5-year budget cycle.
Gradually over the next 6 years I was offered and accepted headquarters positions of increasing responsibility, always in some way related to research and development programs. I even spent a year on developmental assignment in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition. But staff work is not really my cup of tea, so when the chance came to return to AFOSR to manage a basic research program, I jumped, even though it was in an entirely different scientific area.
