Director

Institutional context

The National Science Foundation is the principal United States federal agency for non-medical scientific research funding, established by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. The Director is the senior officer of the agency, presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed for a six-year term. From 1950 through August 1998 every NSF Director was male.

Career path

Rita Rossi Colwell (born 1934) earned a BS from Purdue, an MS from Purdue, and a PhD in oceanography from the University of Washington. She held faculty positions at Georgetown and the University of Maryland, where she served as President of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Her research is in environmental microbiology, particularly the ecology of Vibrio cholerae and the relationship between cholera outbreaks and climate.

Appointment

President Bill Clinton nominated her as Director of the NSF in 1998. The Senate confirmed her, and she took office as the eleventh Director and first woman in the role on 4 August 1998.

Tenure

Five and a half years. Tenure included substantial expansion of NSF's nanotechnology, information-technology, and ecology programmes, the establishment of the ADVANCE programme on women in academic science and engineering, and the agency's response to the post-September-2001 redirection of US research priorities. She served until 21 February 2004 and was succeeded by Arden L. Bement Jr.

Cluster context

Colwell's 1998 appointment is the dataset's earliest US federal-science-agency first-woman event. The NSF has had no woman Director since (Bement, then Subra Suresh, then France Córdova — wait: Córdova was the second woman Director, 2014–2020). The pattern at NSF is therefore: Colwell 1998, Córdova 2014, with subsequent male Directors (Sethuraman Panchanathan).

Sources

• Wikipedia — Rita Colwell
• Wikipedia — National Science Foundation