SPIE-sponsored student Hadiyah-Nicole Green at Congressional Visits Day.

http://spie.org/publicpolicy


SPIE volunteers traveled to Washington, D.C., last week to express support for funding federal research and development programs and to discuss the important economic impacts of such programs.

The SPIE team were among more than 270 scientists, engineers and business leaders who made visits to their representatives' and senators' offices on Capitol Hill as part of the sixteenth annual Congressional Visits Day (CVD) sponsored by the Science-Engineering-Technology (SET) Work Group on 6-7 April (http://www.aboutastra.org/cvd/).

Volunteers on the SPIE team and the states they represented included:

SPIE Fellow Robert Breault (Arizona)
SPIE Student Member Dan Christensen (New York)
SPIE President-Elect and Fellow Eustace Dereniak (Arizona)
SPIE Student Member Hadiyah-Nicole Green (Alabama)
SPIE Past President and Fellow James Harrington (New Jersey)
SPIE Fellow Marc Himel (North Carolina)
SPIE Fellow Robert Lieberman, chair of the Society's Engineering Science and Technology Policy Committee (California)
SPIE Member Christopher Middlebrook (Michigan)
SPIE Director and Fellow Jim Oschmann (Colorado)
Perry Sofferman, Chief Strategy Officer and General Counsel for Tower Optical Coorporation (Florida)
Jim Stein (Virginia), Vice President of Government Affairs for SPIE Corporate Member SCHOTT North America. Stein also staffed an informational booth at an exhibition held during the event at the Rayburn House Office Building.
At the 34 congressional offices they visited, SPIE team members discussed the importance of the nation's broad portfolio of investments in science, engineering and technology to promoting our country's prosperity and innovation. They spoke about the need for:

sustained, long-term funding for research and technology development programs such as the America COMPETES Act of 2010
support for programs to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the nation's schools
support for bills aiming to secure U.S. supplies of rare-earth elements needed in applications ranging from automobiles and computers to security devices and solid-state lighting
reform of export control regulations, to remove barriers to U.S. trade, create jobs and strengthen the nation's leadership in technology.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Congressional visits day
• SPIE
• photonics
• optics
• education
• science
• policy
• washington DC
• government
• lobbying
• STEM education
• funding
• science funding
• physics
• UAB
• National Science Foundation