NSF program

PREM reporting, and where the year actually goes

Partnership for Research and Education in Materials

A PREM is judged on whether the partnership moved students. That is the hardest thing in the report to evidence, and the easiest to under-count.

What the report leans on

Education and workforce development, with particular attention to REU outcomes and the pipeline of students from the minority-serving partner.

The sections that cost the most time

Student pipeline and outcomes: Where students went after the program is the headline, and it is longitudinal. It needs records kept on people who have already left, which almost no center system is built to do.
Partnership activity: NSF wants evidence that the two institutions actually worked together, not that they co-signed a proposal. Exchanges, co-authored papers, shared students, joint courses.
Participation demographics: Required per activity, not in aggregate, and the categories have to be collected in a way that survives a privacy review.
Publications with partner co-authors: Co-authorship across the two institutions is the cleanest proof the partnership is real, and it has to be extracted from bibliographies rather than asserted.

In more detail

What a PREM is

A PREM is a partnership award between a research-intensive institution and a minority-serving institution, funded through NSF's Division of Materials Research. The materials science is real, but the reason the program exists is the partnership and the students who move through it.

That changes what the annual report is for. A MRSEC report has to prove a center is productive. A PREM report has to prove a partnership is working and that students are getting somewhere because of it.

What the annual report asks for

The shared NSF center sections all apply: personnel, publications, outreach, events, partnerships, facilities, seed and leveraged funding, compliance, and forward plans.

The weight sits differently. The education and outreach section, which is one section among eleven for most programs, carries much of the case. Reviewers look for REU cohorts, what those students did next, and whether the minority-serving partner is a full participant rather than a subawardee.

Where the time actually goes

Two places, and both are structural rather than clerical.

The first is longitudinal tracking. A PREM is measured on outcomes that happen after a student leaves, and a center directory built around current affiliations simply has nowhere to record them. So the answer gets reconstructed each year from memory and LinkedIn.

The second is partnership evidence. Everyone involved knows the collaboration is real. Turning that into a defensible list of exchanges, co-authored papers, shared students and joint activities, with dates, is a research project of its own every spring.

The record the report comes out of

A PREM is judged on things that happened, to people who have since left, inside a partnership that spans two institutions. That is a memory problem, and memory is what a spreadsheet is worst at.

We run the PREM program site, alongside MRSEC, NeuroNex and the Materials Innovation Platforms. Close to a decade inside NSF's Division of Materials Research.

On our platform people carry roles with start and end dates, so a cohort that finished two years ago is still answerable without depending on who remembers them. Publications import by DOI with author affiliations attached, which turns co-authorship across the two partner institutions from an assembly job into a query. Outreach, projects and funding sit in the same record.

For a program whose case rests on what happened to students and whether the partnership was real, holding the history rather than the current state is most of the work.

Other programs

Reporting season should be a review, not a reconstruction.

Thirty minutes, no deck. Tell us which sections cost you the most last year and we will tell you whether they are worth automating.

Start a conversation