Please join the Department of Materials Science & Engineering for the John E. Hilliard Symposium on Thursday, May 18th.

This all-day event highlights the research of our most senior graduate students and those completing an Honors Senior Thesis.

Keynote speaker: Christina Freyman

"How do we measure success? The evaluation of federal investments in research and development."

AbstractIn 2016, the federal government funded $15 billion for basic research at universities. Funding is awarded to pursue specific goals, such as to develop human capital, to increase national security capabilities, and to increase U.S. competitiveness. Leaders have sought the evaluation of research and development (R&D) investments since the 1970s as a way to promote evidence-based funding decisions. However, the wide variety of projects and diffuse nature of the outputs of basic research makes the evaluation of the efficacy of federal science investments complex. I present three projects in which I evaluated R&D investments with novel text analytics and machine learning. The first project focuses on how the written language of mathematical scientists and geoscientists changed when they were required to work together in a collaborative funding program. The second project looks at how we measure the skills gained by student program participants by parsing hundreds of resumes with text analytics. The third project demonstrates how our linked large data sets follow knowledge diffusion from National Science Foundation grants to company licensing of patents.