From Science Magazine: “Massive 2021 U.S. spending bill leaves research advocates hoping for more”

From Science Magazine

Dec. 22, 2020

With reporting by Jeffrey Mervis, Jocelyn Kaiser, Adrian Cho, Erik Stokstad, and David Malakoff.

President Donald Trump will leave office next year having overseen robust growth in federal science spending over his 4 years in office despite his administration’s repeated efforts to slash research budgets. Credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters.

The massive $1.4 trillion spending bill that the U.S. Congress finally agreed upon this week should once again reverse the deep cuts the President Donald Trump had proposed for most science agencies, although the outgoing politician has threatened not to sign the bill. Even if he does, the modest hikes for 2021 have left the research community wanting more.

The final budget package includes increases of 3% for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 2.5% for the National Science Foundation (NSF), 2.3% for NASA science, and 0.4% for the Department of Energy (DOE’s) science office. Those numbers (see details below) put the cherry on top of 4 years of robust growth under Trump despite his persistent attempts to eviscerate federal science budgets.

NIH’s budget now stands at $42.9 billion, a 33% rise over its 2016 level of $32.3 billion. Similarly, spending by DOE science tops $7 billion, compared with $5.4 billion in 2017, a boost of 30%. NASA science programs rose by 8% and 11% in 2018 and 2019, respectively, before slowing in 2020 and 2021. NSF’s budget, now nearly $8.5 billion, has grown the least among the four biggest federal science agencies. But even so, a 14% rise since 2017 compares favorably with an overall increase of only 4% during the second term of former President Barack Obama.

For 2021, lawmakers carved out increases for science despite giving themselves almost no additional money, compared with this year, to spend on all civilian programs. That generosity reflects a bipartisan consensus on the value of academic research.

Yet many research advocates are greeting the 2021 numbers with a collective shrug. “The long-overdue full-year appropriations package will provide federal research agencies much-needed funding predictability after an incredibly challenging year,” says Lauren Brookmeyer of the Science Coalition, a group of 50 major research universities.

Research advocates are reacting in a similar fashion to the $900 billion COVID-19 relief measure that was attached to the annual spending bill. Although they recognize the relief bill’s importance as an economic stimulus, it falls far short of what they had sought.

University administrators had lobbied for $122 billion to recover from the impact of the pandemic on their faculty and students. In addition, they had calculated that federal agencies needed at least $26 billion more to finance research lost or delayed when campuses were shut down in the spring.

The relief bill contains only $22 billion for higher education, however, and nothing explicitly for bolstering the research enterprise. The shortfall means academic researchers will look to both Congress and President-elect Joe Biden for help, says Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. “We urge lawmakers to view this deal as only a step toward providing more comprehensive relief.”

Although Biden won’t take the oath of office until 20 January 2021, his transition team is already laying the groundwork for both the next relief package and his first budget submission to Congress in February 2021. Together, they will be a test of whether science can retain its bipartisan support.

Here are some highlights of what Congress allocated to key research agencies for the fiscal year that ends on 30 September 2021.

NIH

The omnibus bill gives NIH a $1.25 billion raise, to $42.9 billion. That 3% boost falls short of the 4.8% raise proposed by Senate appropriators and a whopping 13% increase approved by the U.S. House of Representatives that relied on emergency spending. Trump would have cut NIH’s budget by $2.87 billion.

The 3% boost is the smallest in recent years for NIH. Research advocates are “disappointed,” says Yvette Seger, director of science policy for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, but they realize lawmakers were limited by statutory budget caps. “We hope that this is a 1-year anomaly,” she adds.

The bill includes $300 million for Alzheimer’s disease, for a total of $3.1 billion, continuing a steep 5-year rise in funding for the disease. The National Cancer Institute’s $6.5 billion total includes $37.5 million more for investigator-initiated grants to address a glut of applications that have driven down success rates.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies brain-mapping initiative receives $560 million, a $60 million increase. Research on a universal flu vaccine rises $20 million, to $220 million. New initiatives include $10 million each for research on premature births and tick-borne diseases, and $50 million for studies on using artificial intelligence to treat chronic diseases. Research to prevent gun violence holds steady, at $12.5 million, the second year of funding after a 23-year de facto ban.

DOE science

In the three previous budget cycles, the office’s budget had boomed, increasing by a total of 29.8%. This year, the office—the largest federal funder of the physical sciences—receives a boost of just 0.4% to $7.026 billion.

Congress did minimal juggling of priorities among the office’s six research programs. Advanced scientific computing research, which supports the office’s supercomputing efforts, received a bump of 3.6% to $1.015 billion. Basic energy sciences, which funds research on chemistry, materials sciences, and related fields and also runs DOE’s x-ray and neutron sources, got a 1.4% increase, to $2.245 billion. The budget for biological and environmental research crept up 0.4% to $753 million. Fusion energy sciences and high-energy physics get only $1 million more than they received this year, some $671 million and $1.046 billion, respectively, whereas the budget for nuclear physics is flat, at $713 million.

Lawmakers rallied behind the federal push to build exascale supercomputers, instructing the Office of Science to spend no less than $475 million on the effort. They also endorsed emerging quantum information sciences, requiring the office to spend $245 million on the work. The budget does not include a one-time infusion of $6.25 billion passed this summer by the House.

Although DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy gets only a $2 million boost, to $427 million, another section of the massive spending bill authorizes rapid growth for its work translating basic research into commercially ready technologies. Lawmakers foresee the decade-old agency nearly doubling its budget by 2025, to $761 million.

NSF

This year’s final appropriation continues the slow but steady budget growth at the foundation, which celebrated its 70th anniversary this year. Both its research and education accounts will rise by 2.5%, to $6.9 billion and $968 million, respectively.

Although lawmakers pledge fealty to the idea of keeping their hands off how the agency allocates its pot of money for academic research, they once again set either floors or targets for many programs aimed at groups traditionally underrepresented in science and engineering and states that lag in attracting NSF funding. They also instructed NSF, NASA, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to examine the “racial and cultural makeup” of their workforces and draw up plans to promote “greater racial and cultural acceptance and diversity.” Pointedly, the bill does not include a proposal from the chair of the House science committee, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–TX), for NSF to finance a study of systemic racism in U.S. academic research.

The spending bill also asks NSF to outline its plans for the site in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, that now holds the remains of a 57-year-old, agency-funded radio telescope that recently collapsed. In particular, lawmakers want to know how NSF will decide whether to build a new observatory, and the estimated cost of such a facility.

NASA

The 2.3% increase for NASA’s $7.3 billion science mission directorate maintains the status quo among its five discipline-based program areas. It also provides $127 million for the space agency’s science education initiatives, once again ignoring the president’s request to eliminate the program.

The spending bill frees up NASA to choose any commercial rocket to launch a multibillion-dollar payload that would orbit one of Jupiter’s moons. Previous spending bills had required that the Europa Clipper mission use the Space Launch System being developed to return astronauts to the Moon and beyond.

Congress poured cold water on the Trump administration’s plans to land a human on the moon by 2024. Trump had requested $3.1 billion for a human landing system, but lawmakers provided just $850 million, not nearly enough to meet the administration’s timetable. The incoming Biden administration is expected to revisit the plan.

Census Bureau

Social scientists are applauding Congress for providing what they say is sufficient funding to complete work on the besieged 2020 census. The $1.025 billion includes $91 million from a contingency fund that can be tapped if needed.

At the same time, lawmakers did not mandate a 4-month extension to deliver the results of this year’s census, something agency officials had previously said they needed to cope with the disruptions caused by the pandemic and a truncated count in the fall. The administration later withdrew that request, and social scientists are worried the time crunch could impact data quality.

“Stakeholders will resume their efforts to convince Congress to provide these extensions as soon as the 117th Congress convenes next month,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional aide and longtime census watcher. “Congress must offer certainty to the Census Bureau’s career experts as bureau staff works to finish data processing, tabulate the apportionment counts, and then prepare the redistricting files for the state, which are more complex.”

Agricultural research

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) receives $3.3 billion for its research program, $125 million above this year, including the Agricultural Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. USDA’s primary competitive grants program, the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), got a $10 million raise to $435 million. That marked another incremental win for Supporters of Agricultural Research, an advocacy coalition that has been working to boost AFRI’s budget. Over the past 6 years, it has helped persuade Congress to increase AFRI’s annual budget by $110 million.

U.S. Geological Survey

The agency’s overall budget remains flat at $1.32 billion, an increase of just $45 million over this year. Within its natural hazards program, which will stay nearly constant at $175 million, the only new funding is $4 million for landslide research and preparedness, which doubles that effort to $8 million. Congress said that boost should go toward studying the risk of a serious landslide in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, which might cause a tsunami threatening towns including Whittier and Cordova.

The water resources program fares better with a 12%, $29 million increase to $263 million. The Hydrologic Instrumentation Facility, which improves stream gages and other monitoring devices, wins a $16 million boost to work on a Next Generation Water Observing System, which will provide faster data on water quantity and quality.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The agency survived the last of the Trump administration’s requests to gut its budget. Brushing aside the proposed 28% cut, lawmakers provided a 2% increase overall and a slightly lower 1.8% increase to its science and technology program. But Congress wants its focus sharpened on the high-profile chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are widely used in coatings that resist heat, water, and grease. EPA won a 20% increase to its PFAS research and regulatory activities, which will now be funded at $49 million.

Defense research

Basic research funded by the Pentagon got a 2.6%, $68 million boost to $2.67 billion. Congress ended up rejecting many cuts proposed by the Trump administration and the Senate.

NIST

The agency’s core science programs got a 4.5%, $34 million raise to $788 million. The overall budget was essentially flat at $1.03 billion.

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From “Science”: Women in STEM- “Shake-up at NIH: Term limits for important positions would open new opportunities for women, minorities”

From “Science”

The National Institutes of Health’s in-house research program plans to limit the terms of midlevel managers, in part so that more women can move into leadership positions.
National Institutes of Health/flickr (CC BY-NC)

May 2, 2019
Jocelyn Kaiser

Able to pursue open-ended research without relentless grant deadlines, some scientists who work directly for the National Institutes of Health joke that NIH stands for “nerds in heaven.” But the main NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and its other intramural research sites are also known as stodgy places where the scientific management, mostly white men, tends to stay in place for decades.

Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland

Now, NIH is aiming to shake up its intramural program, the largest collection of biomedical researchers in the world, by imposing term limits on midlevel leadership positions.

Starting next year, the 272 lab and branch chiefs who oversee NIH’s intramural research will be limited to 12-year terms. The policy, now being refined by the directors of NIH’s 23 institutes with in-house science programs, means up to half of the chiefs will turn over in the next 5 years, says Michael Gottesman, NIH’s deputy director for intramural research. “We see this as an opportunity for diversity in the leadership at NIH, especially gender and ethnic diversity,” says Hannah Valantine, NIH’s chief officer for scientific workforce diversity.

The changes are roiling the campus, with some grumbling they will have little impact and others questioning whether good leaders should automatically be replaced. “The appointment of more women … could be a plus, but the ‘coin of the realm’ still remains scientific excellence and productivity,” says Malcolm Martin, who has headed a lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 37 years.

At most institutes, NIH’s intramural lab and branch chiefs oversee several labs or groups. Although they don’t control researchers’ budgets directly, they handle administrative matters, mentoring, and recruitment. Chiefs overseeing clinical studies and shared facilities hold even more sway. “These are fiefdoms where [chiefs have] power and resources,” Valantine says.

Many chiefs (54 of 272) have served at least 20 years, and 17 for more than 30 years, Gottesman says. Although 26% are women—comparable to the 24% women among all NIH tenured researchers—men tend to lead larger programs. Because of the lack of turnover, “People feel like there’s no way they’ll ever have a leadership position,” says Gisela Storz, chair of NIH’s equity committee, which pushed for the changes. “And trainees need to see people in those positions who look like them.”

Under the draft policy released in January, the chiefs will have to step down after at most three 4-year terms. The positions that become vacant will be filled through “open and transparent processes,” the draft policy states. While some institutes already do that, at others, the scientific director overseeing the intramural program “plucks an heir apparent” from internal staff, Storz says.

To help build the pipeline, NIH will rely on a recently launched program aimed at recruiting more tenure-track female and minority faculty. In the long term, NIH hopes its intramural leadership will more closely reflect that women now earn more than 50% of new Ph.D. degrees in the biological sciences, Valantine says.

Individual institutes are now figuring out how to enact the term limits “in a way that’s not disruptive,” Gottesman says. Some chiefs may be exempt, he says, if a change would have “serious consequences” for science programs, for example because there is no pool of candidates for the job.

One former NIH veteran is skeptical. “How much have they thought this through?” asks Story Landis, who was scientific director and later director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. She questions why NIH would want to replace a midcareer chief doing a stellar job. And, she wonders, will the job searches truly be open? Will women get the training they need to move into leadership positions?

Others point out that NIH’s scientific directors—seven of whom are now women—are the true feudal lords, and the new policy does not affect them. Gottesman has held his job for 25 years.

But he and the scientific directors he oversees may be next: NIH term limits could “move up to other kinds of leadership,” Valantine says.

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From Rutgers University: “Rutgers-Led Team Awarded $29 Million NIH Grant for Statewide Translational Research Institute”

Our Great Seal.

From Rutgers University

March 11, 2019

Patti Verbanas
848-932-0551
patti.verbanas@rutgers.edu

A NIH grant will advance moving research discoveries into clinical practice and improve health care in the state.

Reynold A. Panettieri, vice chancellor for Translational Medicine and Science and director of Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a Rutgers-led team $29 million to translate clinical research into patient care and treatment more quickly.

The Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science, which includes Princeton University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, will receive the grant over five years for joining the NIH’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program.

Translational science takes observations made in the laboratory, clinic and community and creates interventions that improve the health of individuals and populations – from diagnostics and therapeutics to medical procedures and behavioral interventions.

“The ultimate goal is bringing more evidence-based treatments to more patients more quickly,” said Reynold Panettieri, vice chancellor for translational medicine and science and director of Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science. “In addition, our partnership with RWJBarnabas Health gives us a great opportunity to expand our clinical research, connecting the basic science research done by our 200+ investigators to patient care statewide.”

The clinical and translational program at Rutgers will be known as NJ ACTS: New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science. Additional funding from the institutions will grow the program to about $45 million.

NIH supports a national network of more than 50 programs at medical research institutions nationwide that collaborate to speed the translation of research discoveries into improved patient care. It enables research teams, including scientists, patient advocacy organizations and community members, to tackle system-wide scientific and operational problems in clinical and translational research that no one team can overcome.

The grant will allow Rutgers and its partners to train and cultivate the translational science workforce; engage patients and communities in every phase of the translational process; promote the integration of special and underserved populations in translational research across the human lifespan; innovate processes to increase the quality and efficiency of translational research, particularly of multisite trials; and advance the use of big data information systems.

The collaborative program develops innovative approaches to barriers in clinical research, such as the efficient recruitment of research participants and approvals for multisite clinical trials.

Rutgers and its partners will build a new infrastructure for clinical and translational research across the entire state, which will give patients access to clinical trials with cutting-edge care.

In addition, NJ ACTS will have the capacity to analyze big data to discover trends in population health that can inform basic science research. It will also allow for diversity in clinical trials across Rutgers’ five clinical research units, which include the Adult Clinical Research and Pediatric Clinical Research Unit at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and centers based at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Rutgers School of Dental Medicine, and Rutgers Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute.

“This huge grant is a natural outgrowth of the integration of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Rutgers, and the type of opportunity for New Jersey then envisioned by the state government. It will foster the further development of innovation in New Jersey,” said Brian L. Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and executive vice president for health affairs for Rutgers. “It would not have been possible without the combination of resources from these two large great universities as well as the funding provided through our partnership with RWJBarnabas Health. It indicates to the world and to New Jersey industry that New Jersey is now in the big leagues of academic clinical research.”

The grant also will build a pipeline for new clinical investigators by funding two positions a year for five years for junior faculty or professionals finishing their post-doctoral fellowship who can move into faculty positions with two years of guaranteed support. It will fund six positions for graduate students, who will be trained in translational and clinical research.

The grant was awarded due to the strength of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Science, the alliance between Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, Princeton and NJIT, and the partnerships with community-based organizations, hospitals, community health centers, outpatient practices, data centers and health information exchanges. It reaches nearly seven million of the state’s nine million residents.

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From SLAC Lab: “SLAC Will Open One of Three NIH National Service Centers for Cryo-Electron Microscopy”

From SLAC Lab

May 15, 2018
Glennda Chui

Proton pumps control the balance of acidity in the cell. This cryo-EM image shows a proton pump that’s part of an enzyme found in both yeast and humans. It consists of 15 protein subunits. The pink part rotates to transport protons across the cell’s outer membrane. Mutations in the human version of the pump interfere with the body’s normal cycle of continually replacing old bone with new. (https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765%2818%2930104-7 [Molecular Cell])

The National Institutes of Health center on the SLAC campus will make this revolutionary technology available to scientists nationwide and teach them how to use it to study 3D structures of biological machines and molecules.

The National Institutes of Health announced today that it will establish a national service and training center for cryogenic electron microscopy research at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Professor Wah Chiu and members of the new Stanford-SLAC cryo-EM team stand in front of a cryo-EM instrument as work nears completion on their new facility at SLAC. (Dawn Harmer- SLAC)

It’s one of three national service and training centers the NIH is setting up to make the Nobel prize-winning technology available to scientists nationwide and teach them how to use it.

Known as cryo-EM for short, this powerful high-resolution imaging method has become a revolutionary tool for biology over the past few years due to rapid improvements in transmission electron microscopes, detectors and software. Last year the technique earned three of its key developers the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Cryo-EM allows scientists to make detailed 3D images of DNA, RNA, proteins, viruses, cells and the tiny molecular machines within the cell, revealing how they change shape and interact in complex ways while carrying out life’s functions.

However, the high cost of buying and operating the high-voltage electron microscopes and a lack of training opportunities have slowed the widespread adoption of the technology.

The new data collection centers will address this by providing funding for instruments and associated lab equipment and bringing in scientists from across the nation for research and training. In addition to SLAC, centers will be set up at the New York Structural Biology Center and at the Oregon Health & Science University in partnership with DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the NIH announced. The awards are anticipated to total $128 million over six years, pending the availability of funds.

“Cryo-electron microscopy is allowing us to resolve the three-dimensional structures of important biomolecules involved in disease that were inaccessible using previous technologies,” said National Institute of General Medical Sciences Director Jon R. Lorsch. “NIH wants to ensure as many scientists as possible have access to this crucial technology.”

The NIH center at SLAC will be known as the SLAC-Stanford Cryo-EM Center (S2C2). It marks the second major step in carrying out the Stanford-SLAC Cryo-EM Initiative, whose goal is to establish one of the world’s foremost hubs for cryo-EM research and training for scientists at the lab, the university and in the broader scientific community around the globe.

The first step took place earlier this year, when the Stanford-SLAC Cryo-EM Facility opened on the SLAC campus with four state-of-the-art microscopes.

The new NIH center, which will operate independently but in synergy with the recently established Stanford-SLAC facility, will install several more electron microscopes and associated specimen preparation devices in the lab’s soon-to-open Arrillaga Science Center.

“This new center complements our existing facilities and capabilities, enhancing an integrated suite of unique tools to advance materials, chemical and biological science discoveries critical to the DOE Office of Science mission,” said SLAC Director Chi-Chang Kao.

Wah Chiu, a professor at SLAC and Stanford and leader of the cryo-EM program, added, “This is an exciting moment for those in the U.S. scientific community who do not have access to cryo-EM instrumentation in their own institutions, and we are very pleased to share our decades of experience in this research with others.

“I believe that this NIH initiative will have a great impact on popularizing this powerful imaging tool,” he said, “which will likely lead to many discoveries of 3D structures of biological machines and molecules in both their normal and diseased states and hasten our national efforts to prevent and cure a variety of diseases, including cancer, diabetics, neurodegeneration, cardiovascular diseases and infection.”

For questions or comments, contact the SLAC Office of Communications at communications@slac.stanford.edu.

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From MIT: “Dongkeun Park: Winding his way to medical insights”

MIT News

December 22, 2017
Paul Rivenberg | Plasma Science and Fusion Center

Francis Bitter Magnet Lab researcher continues a decades-long pursuit to create a revolutionary magnet for nuclear magnetic resolution spectroscopy.

Research Engineer Dongkeun Park (right) and his colleague Juan Bascuñán wind a double-pancake coil with high-temperature superconductor. Photo: Paul Rivenberg/PSFC

Assisted by postdoc Jiho Lee, Dongkeun Park inspects the wiring of a completed HTS coil in preparation for testing it in liquid helium. Photo: Paul Rivenberg/PSFC

In the completed 1.3 GHz magnet, the three HTS coils (pink) that make up the H800 magnet are nested within the LTS coils composing the L500 (blue). Image courtesy of PSFC

Research Engineer Phil Michael transfers liquid helium to the cryostat in preparation for testing the middle of the three HTS coils as Dongkeun Park looks on. Park and his colleagues expect to test the three-coil assembled H800 magnet in early in 2018. Photo: Paul Rivenberg/PSFC

Research engineer Dongkeun Park watches a thin, coppery tape of high-temperature superconductor (HTS) wind its way from one spool on his plywood worktable to another, cautiously overseeing the speed and tension of the tape’s journey.

When completed, in about half a day, this HTS double-pancake (DP) winding will look like two flat coils, one atop the other, but they will be one, connected internally, leaving both terminal ends on the outside. Park has been managing this process on and off for eight years, knowing that every turn of the coil creates a stronger magnet. This is just one of 96 double pancake coils that have been wound over the past five years for an 800 MHz HTS insert coil, the H800, being built in the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory (FBML) at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

High-field superconducting magnets are vital for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a technology that provides a unique insight into biological processes. The stronger the NMR magnet, the greater the detail and resolution in imaging the molecular structure of proteins, providing researchers with the information they may need to develop medications for combating disease.

Park joined the laboratory as a postdoc in 2009. He traces his interest in superconductivity, and MIT, to a lecture given by visiting FBML magnetic technology division head Yuki Iwasa at Yongsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Park says that as a graduate student in electrical engineering, “I wanted to make something by hand, not only by calculation.”

When Park first arrived at FBML, the lab had been working on high-resolution HTS-based NMR magnets since 1999 as part of a program sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to complete a 1-GHz NMR magnet with a combination of low temperature superconductor (LTS) and HTS double-pancake insert coils. The lab’s work on LTS-based NMR began several decades earlier.

At the time of his arrival, NIH and MIT had recently agreed to increase the target strength of the magnet being developed from 1 GHz to 1.3 GHz. To reach this strength, FBML planned to create an H600 magnet and nest it inside a 700 MHz LTS (L700) magnet, which could be purchased elsewhere. Park notes that this combination translates to a magnetic field strength of 30.5 Tesla, “which would make it the world’s strongest magnet for NMR applications.”

One responsibility given to Park, along with his colleague research engineer Juan Bascuñán, was to wind each DP, then test it in liquid nitrogen. The DPs would then be stacked, compressed, joined together and retested as a finished coil. Finally, this stacked coil would be over-banded with layers of stainless steel tape to support the much larger electromagnetic forces generated during high-current operation in liquid helium. Park and his colleagues needed to create two of these coils, one slightly larger than the other, and nest them inside a series of LTS coils to create the final magnet. The combined coils would create a magnet that could provide the sharpest imaging yet for investigating protein structure, possibly three times the image resolution from FBML’s current 900-MHz NMR.

In December 2011, Park and his colleagues had virtually finished the preliminary DP windings, and were looking forward to stacking them for further testing. But returning from MIT’s winter recess, they discovered that the coils were missing. The 112 double pancake coils they had carefully crafted and wound for the H600 had been stolen.

Park’s current PSFC colleague, research scientist Phil Michael, suggests that the theft, though traumatic to the project, “ultimately made the magnet better.” To save money, MIT and NIH decided that instead of purchasing an L700 magnet to surround the H600 coils as originally planned, they could use an L500 coil already on hand at FBML, and create for it a higher strength HTS magnet: the H800.

With new security measures in place, Iwasa’s group set out to accomplish this goal by adopting a new HTS magnet technology known as no-insulation winding, developed by Park along with former FBML research engineer Seungyong Hahn. All previous coils had been created from HTS tape insulated with plastic film or high resistive metal. The new coils would be made without the insulation, allowing them to become more compact and mechanically robust, with increased current density.

Park did not take part in the early production of the H800. In February of 2012, he decided to pursue an opportunity to make a new commercial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) magnet for Samsung Electronics in South Korea and the UK. In 2016 he happily returned to MIT as a research engineer, his hiatus having provided him an appreciation for the benefits of an academic environment.

“A company’s objective is to make a profit. So you must always be concerned with reducing costs,” he says. “This is very different from exploring basic science and engineering on innovative ideas at MIT.”

Although many coils for the H800 had been wound in his absence, he returned in time to complete and test more than half the required DP coils, along with team members Bascuñán, Phil Michael, Jiho Lee, Yoonhyuck Choi, and Yi Li. As 2018 approaches the three HTS coils necessary to create the H800 are nearly completed. Only Coil 3 remains to be finally tested in liquid helium. As the new year begins, the coils will be combined and tested as the H800.

But even after the H800 is nested in the L500 coils and the target 1.3 GHz magnet is created, there will still be three to four years of work to ready it for the high-resolution NMR spectroscopy that will provide new insights into biological structures. Until then, Park will remain patient as he looks to other projects he is overseeing, including one developing an MRI magnet for screening osteoporosis.

And yes, his new project requires superconducting coils. Park is always ready to start winding.

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