IRNC: ENgage: Building Network Expertise and Capacity for International Science Collaboration

University Of Oregon Eugene, Eugene OR

Investigators

Abstract

The Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) develops network communications infrastructure and local engineering capacity in areas of the world where inadequate research and education network connectivity poses a significant barrier to collaborations with US scientists and educators. By helping to establish and improve underlying cyberinfrastructure, both physical (network connectivity) and human (technical capacity), NSRC plays an effective role for the US science community by helping to incubate and build sustainable Internet infrastructure to enable international scientific research. The broader impacts of NSRC's activities are global in scope. NSRC's focus on teaching and training about network design and operations, combined with technically supporting international colleagues, results in the development of stable computer networks, managed by local hands, in many countries all over the world. NSRC achieves this through targeted capacity building activities and partnerships with universities, Internet service providers, industry, government and supranational agencies in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America-Caribbean, and North America. NSRC exemplifies the NSF's stated strategic goal of "encouraging collaborative research and education across organizations, disciplines, sectors, and international boundaries." Through coordinated training programs, NSRC builds institutional capacity to support the research community, and leverages US research infrastructure to bring value to international researchers and educators. Through hands-on, lab-based curricula and a train-the-trainers approach, NSRC provides technical capacity development to thousands of network engineers working in hundreds of R&E institutions to augment networking expertise in regions of interest to NSF and the International Research Network Connections (IRNC) community.