President Donald J. Trump announced his intention on April 20 to nominate Catholic University Provost Aaron Dominguez to a six-year term as a member of the National Science Board (NSB).
Consisting of 25 members appointed by the president, the NSB is responsible for pursuing the goals and function of the National Science Foundation (NSF), including the duty to “recommend and encourage the pursuit of national policies for the promotion of research and education in science and engineering.” In addition to serving as an independent body of advisors to both the president and Congress on science and technology policy, the NSB makes decisions regarding the priorities and budget for the NSF and approves new major programs and awards.
“It is a great honor for me to have been chosen to serve our country in such a fashion, especially at a time like this,” says Dominguez, a particle physicist whose research involves using high-energy particle colliders to search for new physics, including the recently discovered Higgs boson. “It will be a privilege to bring the voice of our great Catholic research university to the National Science Foundation.”
According to the NSF Act of 1950, nominees to the NSB “shall be eminent in the fields of the basic, medical, or social sciences, engineering, agriculture, education, research management, or public affairs; shall be selected solely on the basis of established records of distinguished service; and shall be so selected as to provide representation of the views of scientific and engineering leaders in all areas of the nation.”
A recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2005, Dominguez has previously held numerous leadership positions in the L3, CDF, and CMS particle physics experiments at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland and Fermilab in Chicago. He sits on several advisory boards, including QuarkNet, and is an author on more than 1,100 papers in experimental high energy physics and instrumentation.