NSF Elevates Career Staff to Lead Directorates

The National Science Foundation has altered its directorate leadership structure, adding seven “directorate heads” in addition to the existing assistant directors. NSF confirmed that directorate heads will lead the directorates while assistant directors “continue to provide leadership based upon their deep subject matter expertise.”

A spokesperson for NSF said the reorganization happened last August. The directorates announced new leadership in February and NSF updated its leadership webpage in late April.

The updated leadership list comes nearly a year after NSF leadership said in an internal memo that they planned to move “rotator” staff out of key leadership positions, among other workforce restructuring and reduction actions. Rotators are working scientists who are temporarily employed by NSF for a few years at a time. That memo also announced that the number of rotators would be reduced from nearly 400 to about 70.

Because rotators are not federal employees, they cannot perform performance reviews or other supervisory activities that go beyond project management, according to 2022 guidance from the White House Office of Personnel Management. However, the agency continued to appoint rotators to supervisory positions after the guidance was issued, according to a report from the NSF Office of Inspector General last August, which recommended the agency “resolve” those arrangements.

Following this reorganization, the agency no longer has non-federal supervisors overseeing federal employees, an NSF spokesperson said.

As of October 2024, six of the agency’s eight assistant directors and 18 of its 36 division directors were rotators, the report found. Now, all seven directorate heads — the TIP directorate head position is currently vacant — are career staff, with tenures at the agency ranging from five years to over two decades. Each previously served as deputy assistant director, the NSF spokesperson said.

The NSF internal memo said the agency planned to move rotators in Senior Executive Service positions, which are key leadership positions just below presidential appointees, into “new, executive-level positions where they will retain program responsibility and authority but will no longer supervise federal employees” within 30 days. Science previously reported that assistant directors will shift from head management to advisory roles, and suggested that the positions will ultimately cease to exist.

The agency currently has four remaining assistant directors, seven directorate heads, and eight total directorates. Announcements from NSF indicate that, in cases where there is both a directorate head and an assistant director, both of them will lead the directorate.

NSF Chief Management Officer Micah Cheatham said in a February National Science Board meeting that for temporary staff, agency leadership “looked at where individuals had skills that would support administration priorities” and did not renew temporary appointments where there was “not a good match.”

The directorate heads are:

• Theresa Good for Biological Sciences,
• Irina Dolinskaya for Computer and Information Science and Engineering,
• Don Millard for Engineering,
• Joydip Kundu for Geosciences,
• Tie Luo for Mathematical and Physical Sciences,
• Christina Freyman for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and
• Sylvia Butterfield for STEM Education.

The directorate head for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships is currently vacant following Gracie Narcho’s retirement in March.

The remaining assistant directors are:

• Susan Marqusee for Biological Sciences. Her NSF appointment began in June 2023, and she has worked at the University of California Berkeley since 1992.
• David Berkowitz for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. His NSF appointment began in September 2024, and he has worked at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln since 1991.
• James Moore for STEM Education. His NSF appointment began in August 2022, and he has worked at Ohio State University since 2002.
• Erwin Gianchandani for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. He has worked at NSF since 2012 and has been the TIP assistant director since the directorate was founded in March 2022.

NSF is currently experiencing a dearth of top leadership. The White House fired all members of the NSF’s governing board last month, and the agency’s last Senate-confirmed director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned over a year ago. The president’s pick for the next director, Jim O’Neill, was announced in February, and he has not yet received a confirmation hearing in the Senate.