Is the Recovery Act Stimulating Science and the Economy?
PRINT SHARE a2a_linkname=”ScienceWorksForUS”; a2a_linkurl=location.href; a2a_num_services=22; By Katherine Harmon, Scientific American February 17, 2010 “It already does have the immediate impact to attract and hire staff,” says Amy Pienta, an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who is using an ARRA-funded NSF grant to evaluate the stimulus’s impact on the social sciences. Most of the awards may not be big enough to fund senior-level positions, she says, but many of them will “certainly” help hire “people who are on the front lines of a lot of the work—on data collection, data analysis.” She offers as an example her own project, which will hire someone to do computer programming. “We’re able to advertise in the community,” she says. “That’s pretty immediate.” Matthew Thomas, a professor at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at The Pennsylvania State University who is running a project funded by a $1.8-million NSF stimulus grant to study the i
