2026 MSA Strategic Initiatives

[claude]

Adds a starter working document for a proposal to the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) 2026 Strategic Initiatives call: the call's 2026 areas of emphasis and a draft outline for a CALIBER proposal.

Related to #7 (opened from the issue as requested; not intended to close it).

Generated with Claude Code

[ronnie-guymon]

@claude I recently got this email from MSA:

"We are excited to announce that applications are now open for the 2027 Microscopy Society of America (MSA) Strategic Initiatives. Funding is available to support bold and innovative new programs that advance the mission and goals of MSA.

We invite applications for programs that will advance or disseminate knowledge in the science and practice of microscopy, imaging, and compositional analysis, as well as instrumentation related to these activities.

Funding is not intended to sustain existing established programs. Expansion of current MSA programs is acceptable only if the proposal represents a major and bold new direction within the program. Priority will be given to new initiatives and proposals that address one or more of following areas of emphasis designated by the council:

Novel initiatives that promote student involvement in microscopy. Areas of interest include outreach, training, K-12 teacher support, workshops, and meetings. This does not include support for the primary research and educational missions of institutions.
MSA-branded development and dissemination of information and open source tools related to advances in microscopy, microanalysis, data management, and image analysis.
Enhancement of member benefits that contribute to member engagement and retention.
Leadership training and mentorship to cultivate future leaders for MSA and the field of microscopy.
Initiating or enhancing academic, governmental, and industrial, and outreach partnerships in microscopy application and development. This excludes microscopy vendors and vendors of microscopy-related products.
Collection, preservation, management, and dissemination of microscopy-related information, including technical procedures, basic theories, scientific backgrounds, MSA archived material, and related resources.

Note: These areas are broadly defined and should not be seen as restrictive.



Submission deadline: 11:59 PM Eastern Time on November 1, 2026.

This is your opportunity to help shape the future of MSA and the broader microscopy community. We encourage you to submit your proposals and be part of this exciting opportunity. Click below for more details on the application process and requirements.

We look forward to seeing your innovative proposals!"

Using Edison and the CALIBER target outcomes, create a draft for a proposal to send to the MSA. The second and last points are the two that stick out to me as the most relevant to our lab. As it says, those mentioned areas are not restrictive, but it would be good to stick to ideas that we know they will be looking for.

[claude]

Claude finished @ronnie-guymon's task in 33m 5s —— View job

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MSA 2027 Strategic Initiatives — proposal draft ready

• Gather context (CALIBER overview, starter doc, planning issues EDS parameters #1–SEM parameters #3, Feedback loop #5, Full process outline #7, Identifying potential reviewers and collaborators, etc. #10, Standards #12)
• Confirm MSA call details (up to $15k/1 yr or $20k/2 yr; primary applicant must be an MSA member; deadline Nov 1, 2026, 11:59 PM ET)
• Launch Edison research tasks (LITERATURE needs-evidence + LITERATURE_HIGH landscape review — both completed with status success)
• Write the proposal draft
• Retrieve Edison results and integrate findings/references
• Commit and push draft + Edison artifacts

Deliverable: 2027_msa_strategic_initiatives_proposal.md — a full draft titled "The MSA Microanalysis Parameter Commons": an MSA-branded open-source release of CALIBER (Area 2 of the call) plus a curated, DOI-citable knowledge base preserving why acquisition parameters are chosen (Area 6), with student curation, an open validation benchmark on the alloy campaign, and M&M/Microscopy Today dissemination as supporting threads. It includes call constraints, a summary, an area-by-area alignment table, a cited needs statement, four objectives with deliverables, an 8-quarter work plan, a $20,000 two-year budget sketch, metrics, sustainability, and 18 references.

What Edison contributed (full reports committed: needs evidence, landscape review, plus artifact tables and raw trajectory JSONs):

• Hard numbers for the needs statement: standards-based SEM-EDS reaches about ±5% relative uncertainty vs. ±30% standardless (NPL, 2026); EBSD indexing fell from 34.9% to 9.3% when scan rate rose from 54 to 154 patterns/s; a 12-phase candidate list produced zero correct assignments despite ideal beam settings (Microscopy & Microanalysis, 2021); XRF has over-reported trace Mg in Al by 5000% relative.
• A documented evidence gap — no controlled factorial acquisition study exists for LPBF AlSi10Mg — which the proposal's open benchmark (Objective O3) is positioned to fill.
• A tool-by-tool table showing HyperSpy/kikuchipy/EMsoft/napari etc. are post-acquisition only, so CALIBER is framed as connective infrastructure, not duplication; ten distilled gap statements; and society-platform precedents (rOpenSci, MolSSI, ELIXIR) grounding the sustainability plan.

Needs your input before submission (marked [TODO] in the draft): PI name + MSA membership confirmation, partner list (call excludes microscopy vendors), the second high-impact EDS parameter, budget tuning, and the MSA committee/FIG for the sustainability handoff. The 2026 starter doc now points to this draft, since the email's 2027 cycle (with the new Area 6) supersedes it.

Key commands (all succeeded):

pip install edison-client                          # 0.16.1
# create_task(JobNames.LITERATURE) → success in ~12 min
# create_task(JobNames.LITERATURE_HIGH) → success in ~20 min; polled in one blocking call
git commit 7fe9826 "Add MSA 2027 Strategic Initiatives proposal draft with Edison research"
git-push.sh origin HEAD                            # pushed to claude/issue-7-20260902-2015

Note: microscopy.org refuses direct connections from this runner, so call requirements (funding levels, membership rule) were verified via web search of the program page — worth a manual skim to confirm the 2027 application form's specifics.

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[ronnie-guymon]

cc @sgbaird

[ronnie-guymon]

@claude also make readable pdfs out of the drafts

[claude]

Claude finished @ronnie-guymon's task in 6m 7s —— View job

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PDFs of both MSA drafts are now on the branch

• Gather context — read both drafts and check the runner's toolchain
• Install converter stack (pandoc 3.1.3 + WeasyPrint 69; no TeX distribution needed)
• Generate PDFs with a print stylesheet (Letter, 1-in margins, running header, page numbers, bordered tables)
• Visually verify every page renders readably
• Commit and push (86b1504)

Deliverables — GitHub renders these directly in the browser:

• 2027_msa_strategic_initiatives_proposal.pdf — 6 pages
• 2026_msa_strategic_initiatives.pdf — 1 page

Verification: I rendered all 7 pages to images and inspected each one. Table header rows repeat when a table crosses a page break (alignment, work-plan, and budget tables all split cleanly), the ± / ≥ / ° / — glyphs render correctly, the 18 DOI links are clickable and wrap without overflowing, [TODO] markers stay visibly highlighted, and each page carries a running title header plus "n of N" page numbers.

Approach: pandoc (GFM) → WeasyPrint with a custom print stylesheet, rather than a TeX distribution — a single pip install, full Unicode via system fonts (Liberation Serif/Sans), and small download, in line with the CLAUDE.md preference for minimizing install time. Key commands (all succeeded):

sudo apt-get install -y pandoc poppler-utils fonts-liberation && pip install weasyprint
pandoc 2027_msa_strategic_initiatives_proposal.md -f gfm -t html5 -s --embed-resources \
  --css=/tmp/msa_pdf.css --pdf-engine=weasyprint --metadata lang=en-US \
  -o 2027_msa_strategic_initiatives_proposal.pdf   # same for the 2026 doc
git commit 86b1504 "Add PDF renders of the MSA strategic initiatives drafts"
git-push.sh origin HEAD

Two notes: repo-relative links inside the PDFs (e.g. to outputs/...) are display-only since they can't resolve from a standalone file — all DOI/web links work. The Edison research reports were not converted (the request covered the drafts); say the word if you want PDFs of those too. Regenerating after future draft edits just needs the commands above.

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[ronnie-guymon]

Reading through the 2027 pdf, @claude where did you get the requirement that the person who submits it needs to be a member of the MSA? I was looking into signing up, it costs $20/year.

[claude]

Claude finished @ronnie-guymon's task in 5m 37s —— View job

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Where the MSA-membership requirement came from

• Locate the membership claim in the drafts
• Trace where it came from (Edison vs. web search in the earlier session)
• Re-verify against current MSA sources
• Report findings with sources

Short answer: It comes from the MSA Strategic Initiatives program page itself — microscopy.org/strategic-initiatives states: "The primary applicant must be a current member of MSA." The announcement email you received doesn't mention it; the rule sits in the application details the email links to.

How it got into the draft. During the Sept 2 session, microscopy.org refused direct connections from the GitHub Actions runner (still true today — connect ECONNREFUSED 167.71.190.31:443), so the call constraints were taken from web-search snippets of that program page rather than a direct page load — that's what the "verified via web search" caveat in my earlier comment referred to. It was not an Edison finding: the Edison reports mention membership only in the context of other societies' open-infrastructure precedents. In the draft it appears at line 9 (call constraints) and line 26 (the [TODO: confirm membership status] next to the PI slot).

Re-verified today, three independent ways:

1. A search scoped to site:microscopy.org returned the exact sentence "The primary applicant must be a current member of MSA" from the Strategic Initiatives page (alongside that cycle's Nov 1 deadline).
2. The program's founding announcement in Microscopy Today — The MSA Bold Strategic Initiative Funding Program (Cambridge) — carries the same requirement; the rule has been part of the program since it was established in 2018.
3. The same searches independently reproduced the funding levels in the draft ($15k/1 yr, $20k/2 yr, 3–4 awards), which is a good sign the snippets reflect the real page.

One honest caveat: because the site blocks this runner, I can't load the live 2027 application page verbatim — the exact-sentence snippet I matched carried a prior cycle's deadline. The requirement is confirmed for earlier cycles and has been stable since 2018, but since you're already on the site pricing membership, a 10-second glance at the 2027 application requirements section will settle it conclusively.

On the $20/year: per the Join MSA page snippets, regular membership runs about $70/yr, so a $20/yr rate is likely a student, early-career, or similar tier — worth checking which category you were quoted. As written, the rule only says "current member" without restricting tier. Either way it's inexpensive relative to a $15–20k ask, and having the PI be a member reads well to the MSA council reviewers regardless.

No file changes were needed — the draft's line 9 wording and the line-26 TODO already reflect the requirement accurately.

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