MRSEC reporting, and where the year actually goes

What a MRSEC is

MRSECs are the canonical multi-institutional materials centers, funded by NSF's Division of Materials Research. A MRSEC is organized into research thrusts, usually a set of Interdisciplinary Research Groups plus seed thrusts, and it operates shared experimental facilities that are open to users outside the center.

That structure is what makes the reporting hard. A MRSEC is not one project with one team. It is several overlapping groups, a facility with external users, an education and outreach program, and a partnership roster, all reported as one center.

What the annual report asks for

The report goes to NSF through Research.gov on a cycle tied to the award start date, not the calendar year, and it is due within ninety days of the period ending. In practice most coordinators start about sixty days out.

The sections are largely shared with other NSF center programs: executive summary, personnel, publications and research products, outreach and broader impacts, events and meetings, partnerships, facilities, seed funding, leveraged funding, compliance, and plans for the next period.

What is particular to a MRSEC is how much of that has to be resolved by thrust. Personnel, publications and seed funding all have to attribute back to a thrust, and thrust membership changes during the year.

Where the time actually goes

Almost none of it goes into writing. It goes into finding out.

The bottleneck in every center we have worked in is the same: getting people to answer. A postdoc left in March and nobody updated the roster. Three papers came out that acknowledged the award and two did not. The facility manager has usage logs but not the internal-versus-external split. The REU coordinator has the participation numbers in a spreadsheet that lives on somebody's laptop.

By the time all of that has been chased down, the reporting window is nearly closed and the narrative gets written in a weekend.

The record the report comes out of

Almost everything in that list is a data problem wearing a writing problem's clothes. The narrative takes a weekend. The eleven months in front of it are what cost.

We run the public program sites for MRSEC, PREM, NeuroNex and the Materials Innovation Platforms, which is close to a decade inside NSF's Division of Materials Research. Centers on our platform hold people, projects, publications, outreach and funding as one structured record rather than as six spreadsheets and a shared drive.

Two parts of that carry a MRSEC report. Publications import by DOI through CrossRef, and the funding acknowledgment is parsed and matched against the award number rather than taken on trust, with anything unverifiable flagged for review. People carry roles with start and end dates, so a question about the reporting period returns a reporting-period answer instead of today's roster.

That is the difference between a system that knows the present and one that knows what happened. A MRSEC report is entirely a question about what happened.