Dr. Rita R. Colwell, Director of NSF, has announced that she will leave NSF to become Chairman of Canon U.S. Life Sciences, Inc., a subsidiary of Canon USA that aims to develop life-science products with applications to diagnostics and medical instrumentation. She will also hold an academic position at Johns Hopkins. Her resignation from NSF is effective February 21, 2004.

During Dr. Colwell's term at NSF, the NSB split off from NSF for the first time and received an independent annual Congressional appropriation. Consortia of public advocacy groups, such as the Coalition for National Science Funding, were regularly effective in pushing up NSF Budgets on Capitol Hill for over a decade and pushing forward a bill in the last Congress to reauthorize NSF and to double the NSF budget over 5 years. For the doubling to actually occur, this authorization bill must be implemented by allocation bills over the next few years.