The National Science Foundation (NSF) is seeking a qualified candidate to serve as a Program Director in the Documenting Endangered Languages Program, in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), within the Directorate for Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arlington, VA.
NSF Program Directors bear the primary responsibility for carrying out the agency’s overall mission to support innovative and merit-reviewed activities in basic research and education that contribute to the nation’s technical strength, security, and welfare. Fulfilling this responsibility requires not only knowledge in the appropriate disciplines, but also a commitment to high standards, a considerable breadth of interest and receptivity to new ideas, a strong sense of fairness, good judgment, and a high degree of personal integrity.
The Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences supports research to develop and advance scientific knowledge on human cognition, language, social behavior and culture as well as the interactions between human and natural systems. BCS programs consider proposals that fall squarely within disciplines, but they also encourage and support interdisciplinary projects. These are evaluated either through joint review among programs in BCS, joint review with programs in other Divisions, or by NSF-wide multi-disciplinary panels. All programs in BCS consider proposals for research projects, conferences, and workshops.
Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) is an activity conducted in coordination with the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and advance scientific and scholarly knowledge concerning endangered human languages. Made urgent by the imminent death of roughly half of the approximately 7000 currently used human languages, DEL seeks not only to acquire scientific data that will soon be unobtainable, but also to integrate, systemize, and make the resulting linguistic findings widely available by exploiting advances in information technology. The program focuses on language description, infrastructure, and computational methods.