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For Early Adopters

MESA's Phase 2 plan calls for 100–200 early-adopter prototype users in Year 1, scaling to 300–500 prototype-validated users by Year 2. We are actively onboarding researchers from three NSF synthesis centers and AI institutes:

  • ESIIL — Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab (CU Boulder, DBI-2153040)
  • NCEMS — National Center for Ecological Microbiology Synthesis (Penn State, DBI-2335029)
  • AIIRA — AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture (Iowa State, NIFA-1027030)

In addition, MESA welcomes individual researchers and groups across NSF directorates whose science would benefit from cross-domain data integration grounded in metadata.

What you get as an early adopter

  • Hosted MCP access to the MESA prototype on the Jetstream-2 deployment, so you can connect your favorite AI assistant without standing up infrastructure yourself.
  • CyVerse storage allocation through MESA's leveraged 5.2 PB iRODS Data Store.
  • Direct support from the MESA team through dedicated Slack channels and monthly office hours.
  • Co-authorship and training opportunities through the Educator Fellows program and project workshops.

What we ask in return

  • Feedback — bug reports, feature requests, and informal usability notes that help us shape the follow-on operations proposal.
  • A Letter of Support (target: ≥8 LoSes by Month 24) for the follow-on Category I / II NSF operations proposal.
  • Citations for any publications enabled by the prototype, so we can demonstrate impact to NSF.

How to join

  1. Email the PI at tswetnam@arizona.edu with a one-paragraph description of your science use case and the data you want to bring.
  2. The MESA team will follow up within one business week to schedule a 30-minute onboarding call.
  3. You will receive a CyVerse storage allocation and credentials for the hosted MCP service, plus an invitation to the project Slack.

Faster path for existing CyVerse users

If you already have an active CyVerse account and an iRODS home directory, we can skip ahead to MCP-server connection. Mention your CyVerse username in your introductory email.

Workshop schedule

The MESA team runs 8 community workshops over the 2-year award (WBS 7.0, led by G. Chism with project GRAs). See the Workshops page for the rolling schedule.

Code of conduct & ethics

MESA is governed by an external AI Ethics Advisory Board that meets twice per year. All participants — staff, contributors, and early adopters — are expected to follow the project data-governance policy and the AI safety policy.