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budget cuts and HEP grad students

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:00 pm
by goodfromfar
I'm starting to worry that it is going to be difficult to get funding for grad students doing experimental particle physics (ie, me)

from the ILC website.. http://www.linearcollider.org/cms/

"The appropriated FY2008 budget for HEP cut funding nationally to the ILC program by 75%. Since this happened in December—which is 25% of the way through the fiscal year which started on October 1—the money allocated to ILC R&D in the U.S. has all already been spent. Throughout the U.S. HEP program, including at SLAC, all work on the ILC is being stopped and people are being moved to other programs."

from the slac website... http://today.slac.stanford.edu/feature/ ... 010708.asp
"To summarize the major program impacts of the FY08 budget:
• LCLS and LUSI construction will proceed with early operations for the LCLS at the end of FY09 and CD-4 for the LCLS in 2010
• SSRL will likely curtail user operations in FY08 by 15% to cope with the budget shortfall
• The ILC program will be stopped for the rest of this year and faces a very uncertain future
• The B-factory program will terminate at the beginning of March"


anyone hear anything?

should've gone into condensed matter!

budget cuts and HEP grad students

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 8:15 pm
by woooster
Yeah, this is true. My friend who is a High energy experiment grad student at Princeton told me they have budget cut in high energy exp. I think somehow has to do with so much money has gone into LHC, and they don't really know if it is worth it investing other high energy experiment (except neutrino experiment). They may want to know what LHC can find before they invest on ILC.

LHC will dominate the accelerator experiment in the next 10 years. If you look at every major schools, they have a few faculty working on the experiment. Some top program have like ~50 people on the LHC exp., including grad student, postdoc, scientists, professors.

The good thing is every professors that I talked to at different schools, told me that they are looking for a couple of new students in this year's incoming class. In a way, LHC is the prefect experiment for a new incoming student, because the next 5 years will be the prime time of LHC, before they upgrade it to SuperLHC in 201X.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 10:14 pm
by will
I think that the budget cuts suck, personally, because I like the idea of having world-class accelerators in the states. I don't think these cuts will affect your chances or your funding opportunities in grad school, though, as there are still plenty of experiments to design and run on the LHC.

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 11:37 pm
by goodfromfar
That's reassuring...a lot of programs here seem to be more involved in LHC anyway.

I wish education and science had the same lobbying power as the NRA and oil companies...it's sad that it's such a politics game.

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 11:06 am
by dlenmn
Some good news on the government funding front.

"Under the president's plan, the overall, 14-percent increase for the NSF in 2009 would go disproportionately to its directorates that support physical sciences."

Let's just hope congress doesn't muck it up.

Jeffery Brainard and Karin Fischer, "Research Redux: Bush Again Proposes a Flat NIH Budget and Large Increases for Physical Sciences", The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Feb. 2008, <http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id ... f59V2npXsv>

(The link may not work for you -- it was sent to me in an emai.)

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 2:16 pm
by twistor
So is this part of Bush's 3.1 TRILLION DOLLAR budget?

I have an idea. Let's just glue the printers at the Federal Reserve to the on position, that way we can print money until we run out of trees, and spending won't be a problem.

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 2:59 pm
by dlenmn
I didn't say that I approve of all the stuff in the budget or the overall size -- I don't. But this part is certainly a nice change.