Six of them were sworn in by Jack Gibbons, President Clinton's science advisor, on May 7. The board consists of 24 members and the NSF director, who is an ex-officio member.
Members serve six-year terms.
NSB members are drawn from industry and academia, and represent a wide variety of disciplines and geographic areas. They are selected for distinguished service in research, education or public service. A key piece of infrastructure for high performance connections will enable greater international connectivity among high performance networks. The University of Illinois at Chicago, along with the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, the Argonne National Laboratory and Ameritech Corporation will provide this operational interconnection point through Ameritech facilities. The first connection has been formed between NSF's very high performance Backbone Network Service and the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education to help U.S. and Canadian scientists collaborate on research in many disciplines, as well as on joint educational projects involving large, shared databases.