Six regions have been awarded $20 million each to build local research infrastructure to support scientific development in emerging technologies.
The National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or ESPCoR, aims to boost the research competitiveness of targeted state jurisdictions by investing in local research infrastructures and workforces with science, technology, engineering and math capabilities. The five-year awards will fund research into energy-water systems, biomanufacturing, wildfire management, artificial intelligence for health care and transformative language-based data science.
Iowa State University will administer the Chemurgy 2.0 project, an advanced biomanufacturing initiative that focuses on producing bio-based and sustainable materials for health, industry and consumer applications from agricultural materials.
Scientists working with the Idaho Community-engaged Resilience for Energy-Water Systems program will research changes to communities’ energy and water systems across the state’s diverse hydrology, topography and demographics to develop multisystemic resilience to climate-driven, demographic, and technological changes.
The Integrating Montana’s Environmental Research With Smart Sensors initiative will develop smart sensors to better understand fire behavior and the impact of prescribed burns on wildfire risk.
The ADAPT in SC: AI-enabled Devices for the Advancement of Personalized and Transformative Healthcare in South Carolina aims to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence solutions to create biomedical devices that will improve health care outcomes and address the health care needs of those in underserved regions.
In Vermont, the Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge and Stories program will advance a data-driven, computational “science of stories” approach that supports transdisciplinary research in data science, computational social science, digital humanities and complex systems.
West Virginia will build human and physical infrastructure capacity for neuroscience and data science through the West Virginia Network for Functional Neuroscience and Transcriptomics. Researchers will study how the nervous system changes in response to aging and when confronted by change.
NSF’s EPSCOR’s mission is to spark new research that expands the knowledge-based prosperity that comes with innovation. All the award-winning projects feature education, workforce development components and provide inclusive opportunities for rural and underserved communities.
Full story: NSF jumpstarts regional innovation with $20M awards – GCN
