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takyon writes:

National Science Foundation to close its overseas offices

A plan by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to close its overseas offices, first reported on the Science | Business website, is getting mixed reviews in the scientific community. Last week, NSF announced it would shutter its outposts in Beijing, Brussels, and Tokyo by summer; two U.S. staff will return to the agency's headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, and local staff will be reassigned to U.S. embassies. The change reflects a desire for NSF to be "more strategic and focused" in its international affairs, says Rebecca Keiser, head of NSF's international office.

"This is definitely the wrong move," asserts Hitoshi Murayama, a theoretical physicist at University of California (UC), Berkeley, and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo, who has worked with NSF's Tokyo office on events for graduate students and U.S. scientists in Japan. NSF underestimates "the importance of personal connections [in promoting] critical international collaborations in science," he says. "The U.S. is becoming more inward looking."

NSF set up the Tokyo office in 1960. It established a European office in Paris in 1984 and relocated it to Brussels in 2015. The Beijing office opened in 2006. The office websites claim they were instrumental in fostering international cooperation in ocean drilling, earthquake engineering, studies of gravitational waves, and academic exchange programs.

"The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering."

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