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NPACI Education Efforts Nurture
Tomorrow's Scientific Discovery

BY
Sid Karin
NPACI Director
When we created the NPACI partnership, we decided to direct a significant portion of our effort toward Education, Outreach, and Training (EOT) activities. As you read this issue of enVision, you'll notice that we've highlighted the story openings, which have been crafted to show, in non-technical terms, how computational science is used in today's scientific discoveries. In this way, we hope to make the magazine more useful for educators and other readers.

Beyond this change to enVision, our goals within EOT are diverse, and we are fortunate to have many outstanding educational activities and programs participating in this endeavor. In this issue, you'll read about two projects that exemplify some of our EOT goals. In one, workshops and mentoring programs at Rice University in Texas are creating greater representational equity in computing by women and minorities. In the other, advanced computer modeling methods are being used by a research project within the humanities--disciplines not traditionally associated with use of high-performance computing.

EOT-PACI
BUILDING A STRONG FOUNDATION

EOT-PACI

Our EOT goals are carried out in cooperation with our sister partnership, the National Computational Science Alliance. This partnership with the Alliance has spawned a joint organization we call the Education, Outreach, and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI).

In EOT-PACI we have combined the research talents, areas of expertise, resources, and passions of both PACI organizations into a single organization. EOT-PACI is dedicated to promoting the use of emerging computing technologies and advancing the ability of citizens to understand and solve problems in education, science, business, government, and society.

The energies of EOT-PACI are focused on five areas: Enhancing K-12 Education, Undergraduate and Graduate Academic Projects, Universal Access, New Communities, and Evaluation. Together, innovation in these areas is promoting a computing community that represents the diversity of society, comprises the wide spectrum of academic disciplines, and will help meet the demand for scientifically and technically literate students.

EOT brochure

Improving Scientific and Technical Literacy in the U.S.

More information about EOT-PACI is available in the organization brochure. The brochure can be found on-line at http://www.npaci.edu/Outreach/brochure.html, or copies can be obtained by contacting Amy Finley at afinley@sdsc.edu.

BUILDING A STRONG FOUNDATION

The scientific discovery of tomorrow depends on the quality of education today. As part of a university community where one is surrounded by some of the most talented minds in the country, it's impossible not to fully understand the importance of education to the future of research--the elementary school student of today is tomorrow's postdoc or principle investigator. If we do not prepare these young minds, we cannot expect the pace of research to accelerate into the future. Rather, we can expect to be left in the wake of our global counterparts who are investing in the education of their youngsters.

In addition to our EOT-PACI efforts, I have also personally committed NPACI to education, working with our thrust area leaders to insure that research and EOT activities are tightly integrated. I'm pleased to say that we're already seeing some positive results, including closer ties to the national educational community at the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels; the development of proposals supporting EOT efforts; and partnerships with educational groups throughout the country.

If you have any comments about the changes to enVision, please contact the editor, David Hart, at dhart@sdsc.edu or 619-534-8314. We hope to make our NPACI publications as informative and useful as possible, working toward the overarching goal of improving the scientific literacy of all Americans.