Nescent Annual Report, Year 7

In 2011, NESCent continued to expand its programs, introducing new activities (e.g., the Darwin Day Roadshow and the Evolution Film Festival, and a journalist-in-residence program), and bringing to fruition activities that were initiated in 2010 (e.g., the NESCent Ambassador Program and the NESCent Academy, as well as cross- center meetings for postdoctoral fellows and for cyberinfrastructure). The NESCent Oversight Committee met for the first time, bringing together senior administrators from the partner institutions. The focus at that meeting – and indeed, at NESCent for most of this year – was NESCent’s future after NSF funding ceases in 2014. Of relevance to these discussions is the fact that NESCent continues to enjoy the evolutionary science community’s endorsement. Likewise, the partner institutions recognize that sustaining NESCent is important. For its part, NESCent has stepped up its engagement with the partner institutions, capitalizing on the skills and collaborative networks of faculty at these institutions. In an effort to develop a strategy for sustainability, NESCent is developing a business plan for review in the first quarter of 2012 by the Oversight Committee. This year saw a few staff changes, with Phillip Grosshans joining NESCent as our new Assistant Director for Administration. Todd Vision began his sabbatical in the second half of 2011, and Joel Kingsolver presently acts as the Associate Director of Informatics. Other staff losses, particularly in IT, have been challenging, and we expect that this situation will not improve as we head towards 2014. Recognizing that 2014 is going to be a watershed year for NESCent, we move into 2012 preparing to deal with transition, and equip staff with skills to compete in the workforce. NESCent’s visibility within the broader evolutionary science community continues to grow. In 2011, we had more than 77,000 visitors from 176 countries to our website (up from 66,000 visitors from 54 countries last year). Also, in 2011, more than 65 news articles on NESCent science appeared in the mainstream media, including Science Magazine, NPR, Scientific American, Discovery Channel, Wired, The New York Times, and TIME Magazine (up from 40 news articles for last year). In September 2011, NESCent also launched its new website. This year, NESCent submits a proposal to host the 2014 Joint Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society for Systematic Biology, and the American Society of Naturalists (Evolution 2014). The plan is to hold the meeting at the Raleigh Convention Center in June 2014. NESCent is working with an organizing committee drawn from faculty at Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, NCSU, UNC-Greensboro, and East Carolina University. If NESCent’s proposal is accepted, it will provide an opportunity to celebrate 10 years of synthetic evolutionary science, and acknowledge the support that the evolutionary science community has given to the Center.

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