Following up on the communications from NHERI Council, StEER has received a No Cost Extension (NCE) from NSF that will maintain our status responding to qualifying natural hazard events from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. This will allow us to maintain operations while NSF determines next steps for StEER and other aspects of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI).

When not actively responding, we will use this NCE year to: 

1. complete remaining data curation and DesignSafe publication tasks for the datasets that have been collected to date, 

2. conclude the migration of all legacy Fulcrum data housed on different hazard-specific apps into StEER’s Unified App

3. consolidate and release updated guidance and resources that will ensure StEER’s long-term operations and ability of its member community to lead data collection and curation tasks of their own design.

We are pleased to announce that Dinah Lawan, our first Student Administrator, will return to StEER as our Program Manager, replacing Keegan Wolohan. She will maintain our email (admin@steer.network). You can also reach her on Slack.

Finally, when opportunities to renew or extend StEER are revealed, we look forward to soliciting your input on the functionalities and governance that would best serve the StEER member community. 

We know there is great uncertainty surrounding the levels of funding that will be available for research in higher education; we want you to know that StEER will remain available as a platform as we navigate these uncertainties together. 

Sincerely,