The talk will address some of the following questions:

Sara B. Nerlove earned a BA from Radcliffe College and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford University, all in the field of cultural anthropology. Prior to joining the Measurement Methods and Data Improvement Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1980, she engaged in research and teaching in various contexts, notably all but one of these were interdisciplinary: UC Irvine (School of Social Sciences); Carnegie-Mellon University (School of Urban and Public Affairs); SUNY Binghamton (Department of Anthropology); Cornell (Department of Human Development and Family Studies). She also served as a Research Scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute (Human Area Research Center, Seattle, WA) in a Population and Development Policy Program based in Washington, DC. She has also consulted for the RAND Corporation (Department of Economics). Conducting her first anthropological fieldwork at the age of 21, Dr. Nerlove has spent a total of more than three years doing anthropological field research in southern Mexico, southwestern Kenya, highland Guatemala (east of Guatemala City), and Cajamarca in the highlands of Peru. One of her publications that is most relevant to the seminar topic is the following: Shephard, R. N., Romney, A. K, and Nerlove, S. B. (Eds.), 1972, Multidimensional Scaling: Theory and Applications in the Behavioral Sciences, Seminar Press.

 

While at NSF, Dr. Nerlove served in eight programs, five of which were in the social sciences - the quintessential anthropological experience is to wander around in the cultures of foreign disciplines of social science - and also included a program run out of the Research Facilities Office (the last brick and mortar program offered by NSF) as well as a Detail spent in the SBIR/STTR program. The last approximately 23½ years at NSF were spent in the Directorate for Engineering. For 14 years of those years, she was a Program Director in the Small Business Innovation Research Program, and while there drafted the first Small Business Technology Transfer Program Solicitation - representing a major attraction that she had for academe-industry collaborations. In 2006, she was named Program Director for the then-Partnerships for Innovation Program (PFI). The PFI program began in the year 2000 and is now named "Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity". The PFI Program became part of the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships (IIP) when that division was created in 2007. Dr. Nerlove remained Program Director for the Partnerships for Innovation Program during the last 10 years of her tenure at NSF.