Pamela O’Neil is the deputy assistant director of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources. O’Neil’s career has included being a faculty member, academic administrator, and a National Science Foundation program director. She began her career as assistant professor of biology at the University of New Orleans in 1991, where she earned tenure and was later promoted to the position of associate vice chancellor for research. In 2005, O’Neil moved to Brown University to become the assistant vice president for research initiatives. In 2006, she was promoted to the position of associate provost for policy and planning of Brown University.
During her career, she has received several research grants from the NSF to study the evolution of flowering phenology and has published numerous papers in journals such as Evolution, American Journal of Botany, and Ecology. O’Neil was also the principal investigator of an NSF award to develop an undergraduate mentoring program in the Department of Biological Sciences at UNO through the UMEB program and the principal investigator of a $3.3 million grant to Brown University from NSF’s ADVANCE program. O’Neil served as a program director in the Population Biology Program at the NSF from 2001 to 2003. She has served on numerous panels and site review teams for various programs across the foundation. She chaired the COV of the Advance Program in 2005, served as a member of the Advisory Committee for Performance Assessment in 2008–2009, and chaired the Discovery Subcommittee of the AC/GPA in 2009. In October of 2009, she returned to the NSF’s Office of Integrative Activities, where her responsibilities included providing policy support to the office of the director and representing OIA on a number of interdisciplinary programs. In June of 2012, she moved to the Directorate for Education and Human Resources as deputy assistant director.
