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(And, for a primer, check out our own State of the Science report: eos.org/state-of-the...)

McNutt has just taken the stage. This will be her last address, as her tenure as president will end on 30 June, 2026. This past year has been “filled with turmoil on the science policy front,” she said, after reviewing the state of U.S. science in 2024 and 2025.

“Dramatic swings in policy make it challenging for the research community to plan, to prioritize, and move forward," she said.

On everyone’s mind today, she said, is the proposal from the Office of Management and Budget that would enact sweeping changes to the federal funding process. (For more information on that, check out our story: eos.org/research-and...)

"The proposal is that politicians will decide what research to fund, what meetings scientists are allowed to attend, and whether and where the results can be published. Now, what could possibly go wrong with that?" McNutt said.

In the face of a frustrating policy landscape, six changes need to be made, she said: First, the scientific community must reimagine connections between universities and industry.

"Universities need to better understand the needs of industry, and industry needs to accelerate the incorporation of new research into products and services by creating closer connections between these two," McNutt said.

McNutt's second focus in on realigning the academic award system to better recognize the impact of research. "We need different criteria," she said.

"Faculty aren't going to engage unless we change the promotion and tenure guidelines, because success in industrial collaborations is not measured by high-impact publications, by citations, or by the number of single PI grants," she added.

McNutt pointed out a few examples of institutions that have done this well. Michigan State University, for example, updated its reappointment, promotion, and tenure framework to emphasize publicly engaged scholarship, interdisciplinary work, innovation, and entrepreneurship, she said.

#3 on McNutt's list: Meeting the needs of the STEM workforce. The majority of STEM graduates are employed outside of academia, and universities must better train students for work in industry, she said.

McNutt named three programs that exemplify a better approach: Claremont College, Northeastern University, and Lehigh University. Each of these institutions "redesign the structure and the incentives of graduate education itself," she said.

Without such a shift, “there will be slower innovation, weaker economic growth, and reduced global competitiveness in important areas like AI, advanced manufacturing, cyber security, and other emerging technologies,” McNutt said.

The fourth area for improvement for McNutt is the need to reduce research regulations. The new OMB proposal would worsen this problem for researchers, she said.

The proposed rule "would increase conflict of interest disclosures, require additional justifications for any payment, expand monitoring responsibilities, add on additional foreign affiliation disclosures, and create new reporting requirements for "Gold Standard Science," she said.

McNutt’s issue #5 is to increase the rate of innovation with the help of automation. “My proposal here is to use AI and robotics to increase the rate of discovery,” she said.

Doing so will make research more reliable, trustworthy, and efficient, she said. “Robots work 24 hours a day. Your graduate students probably only work 20, so this is an advantage."

AI assistance will reduce researcher bias, allow for more efficient use of expensive equipment, create more reproducible research and "bang for the buck" with research investments, and help the U.S. rise in research rankings, she said.

The last area of change McNutt wants to focus on is to “tackle big challenges.” “Researchers need to be encouraged to explore widely and take on big challenges, not just stay safe with incremental research,” she said.

Government science can take the lead on this, she said. However, challenges to innovation within federal science abound: Thousands of federal employees running federal science agencies have left over the past two years.

"Let me end here by saying the U.S. research enterprise has stagnated, but there are robust solutions, they are being implemented, and they are having success," McNutt said in closing. Now, the event will move to a panel discussion.

Moderating the panel is Brandon Ogbunu, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University and the Santa Fe Institute.

Ogbunu is joined by Stacie Bloom, president and CEO of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, former Senator Roy Blunt, Elizabeth Bruce, director of science & innovation policy at Microsoft ...