EAGER: Facilitating International Collaboration to Advance Engineering Research

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Engineering Research Centers (ERC) program in order to advance collaborative, interdisciplinary, innovative engineering research and education. Currently, one of NSF's objectives for the ERC program is to explore how meaningful center-to-center collaboration within the US and internationally may be expanded. Developing opportunities for in-person, collaborative learning between US and international research leaders and funding agency staff has the potential to increase such collaboration through the identification and prioritization of common interests, and through opportunities for relationship building across centers and agencies. Ultimately, the goal of these efforts is to increase and enhance engineering research.Through this project, VentureWell will work with NSF and the ERC community to explore and develop new approaches to international center-to-center collaboration, specifically through convenings of the US and international center-level engineering research communities, science agencies, and relevant domain experts. VentureWell will bring continuity to these activities and work closely with key stakeholders in developing and implementing a strategy for exploring and developing approaches to increasing international center-to-center collaboration. The workshops VentureWell will organize will advance understanding of the conditions that enable increased international center-to-center collaboration and identify efficient approaches and mechanisms to set the conditions for fruitful collaboration and connections among these high-performing science centers. Finally, VentureWell will summarize and synthesize findings from these activities, including best practices, lessons learned, successes, and challenges so that learnings from these activities can inform future work.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.