Success Stories

Mississippi INBRE has announced that they have received their five-year INBRE renewal from NIGMS totaling more than $21 million. Although the renewal period just launched Sept 1, the network has already established two new research labs at the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University, as well as a state-of-the-art data science center.

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The University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) was awarded a $1 million grant from NSF. The grant came from the NSF Engines program and USCB joins more than 40 teams from across the US in receiving the NSF Engines Development Awards meant to encourage collaboration to create societal, economic and technological opportunities within the region. “The grant will allow USCB, along with 12 partners, to plan for the South Coast Regional Innovation Engine which will conduct research to find and understand risks and vulnerabilities in the regional maritime ecosystem in hopes of developing technology to enhance the safety and security of our ports.”

Idaho NSF EPSCoR Track-1 GEM3 Lead Wins NSF RAPID Award to Study Extreme Yellowstone Flooding. Recently, Colden Baxter, Idaho State University, was awarded $100,000 to study how the 1 in 500-year extreme flooding event in June 2022 impacted streams in the headwaters of the Yellowstone and Lamar Rivers. Funded by the NSF’s Rapid Response Research program, Baxter and his doctoral student, Jeremy Brooks, will be measuring the abundance and diversity of the fish and insects like mayflies and midges that call the streams and the riparian ecosystems along their banks home.

Meeko Oishi, New Mexico NSF EPSCoR SMART Grid Center team member, will lead a $1 million project as part of the NSF Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) program.

As a BRITE Fellow, Oishi will be leading a single-principal investigator project titled Autonomous Systems that Accommodate Human Perception and Reasoning about Uncertainty. The project will involve the integration of knowledge of human perception and reasoning about uncertainty into new methods for the design and control of autonomous dynamical systems.

Scientists at Mississippi State University are part of a multi-institutional, $10 million USDA NIFA effort to improve the sustainability and profitability of rice farming in the face of climate change. Louisiana State University is the lead institution on the grant. Other partners include the University of Arkansas and Texas A&M University.

Dae-Sung Hwangbo, University of Louisville, has received a new NIH National Institute on Aging $445,390 R15 grant for his research project, “Genetic Mechanisms of Circadian Clock-Mediated Dietary Restriction in Drosophila.”

This grant is a result of Dae-Sung’s KY INBRE Investigator Development Award (2020-2021).

Hugo Reyes-Centeno has sunk his teeth into a fascinating, multidisciplinary approach to the study of human evolution at the University of Kentucky. That approach involves (yes) teeth — and crania.

As a biological anthropologist, Reyes-Centeno is probing some of the basic questions about why humans have evolved a myriad of differences over the course of about 1 million years.

Reyes-Centeno is among the UK faculty who will be using instrumentation bought and upgraded with a recent $14 million infrastructure NSF grant for noninvasive research on human artifacts and remains in a blossoming heritage science lab, called EduceLab.

Nanomatronix, a local startup company that develops nanotechnology, microelectronics and biotechnology to provide solutions for the healthcare, energy and defense industries, has been awarded a $1.1 million Small Business Innovation and Research Phase II Award from the Department of Defense.

Kartik Balachandran, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Arkansas, has been overseeing the research and development of the Advanced Microphysiological Brain Injury Technology (or AMBIT) Platform and has received a sub-award of $550,000.

SC EPSCoR institution, Furman University, is part of a 15-school cohort that has been awarded $8.625 million by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for the purpose of creating a more inclusive environment for students pursuing STEM fields.

The initiative, HHMI Inclusive Excellence 3 (IE3), challenges US colleges and universities to substantially and sustainably build their capacity for student belonging, especially for those who have been historically excluded from the sciences.