Success Stories
LOUISIANA: INBRE researcher receives Wildlife and Fisheries funding
LBRN PI Dr. Kyle Piller received funding from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries ($177,242) to conduct an environmental DNA survey of an imperiled species in north Louisiana. Title: "Assessing the Conservation Status of the Western Sand Darter, Ammocrypta clara (Percidae) using both field and eDNA approaches".
IOWA: Space Grant Consortium awards graduate student fellowships
The Iowa Space Grant Consortium (ISGC) awards fellowships to support outstanding graduate students pursuing research opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines that support the mission of NASA. For the 2021-2022 academic year, the ISGC is sponsoring the following awardees:
- Katelyn Brinker, Iowa State, Doctorate in Electrical Engineering
- Samuel Duncanson, Iowa State, Doctorate in Geology
- Cecilia Fasano, Iowa, Doctorate in Physics
- Samuel Murphy, Iowa, Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering
- Efrain Rodriguez-Ocasio, Iowa State, Doctorate in Chemical Engineering
- Zackry Stevenson, Iowa State, Doctorate in Microbiology
- Kody Waldstein, Iowa, Doctorate in Immunology
- Murtaza Zohair, Iowa State, Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering
ALASKA: NSF EPSCoR PI appointed to Advisory Board
Former Alaska NSF EPSCoR PI and current member of the EPSCoR Industry Advisory Board Mark Myers has been named to the US Arctic Research Commission.
Dr. Mark Myers has been engaged in Arctic research, resource management and policy for nearly four decades. He is the principal of Anchorage based Myenergies and is engaged, through Deloitte and the U.S. Department of State, in overseas capacity building in government resource ministries in the Arctic, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Previously, he served in senior leadership positions with the State of Alaska, University of Alaska, and the U.S. Department of Interior. These positions included Director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Commissioner of Natural Resources, Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska State Geologist and State Director of Oil and Gas. Dr. Myers spent 26 years in the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve serving as a pilot and intelligence officer. He holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in geology with specialization in clastic sedimentology and the interpretation of paleoenvironments and depositional systems.
Dr. Myers has served on many advisory committees for the Federal and State of Alaska governments including the State of Alaska Committee on Research, the National Petroleum Council, the Methane Hydrate Advisory Committee, the steering committee for the U.S. Global Change Research Program and as a principal member of US Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee. He has also been involved with the Arctic Council, serving as a member of the U.S. Delegation for the 2015 Arctic Council Senior Arctic Officials Meeting and as member of the U.S. delegation to the Sustainable Development Working Group and the Scientific Cooperation Task Force.
ARKANSAS: Children’s Research Institute Gets $11.5M From NIH To Study Obesity Prevention
Scientists at Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences will continue studying the impacts of childhood obesity after the NIH awarded $11.5 million in renewed funding to the ACRI Center for Childhood Obesity Prevention. The grant will fund further improvements to the center’s existing research infrastructure and ensure development of more scientists with expertise in childhood obesity. More
SOUTH DAKOTA: EPSCoR researcher receives NSF CAREER Award
South Dakota State University assistant professor Anamika Prasad is the first Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty member to receive the prestigious NSF CAREER award. Prasad will work with the SD Discovery Center in Pierre to create culturally sensitive lesson plans to increase interest in biomaterials and plant-based research among rural and Native American students. The center will distribute the lessons to libraries and schools in the state both in-person and through virtual tools and the South Dakota Education portal. The education portal was created through NSF EPSCoR support and connects research to classrooms.
ALASKA: Researcher awarded US Patent
Alaska INBRE researcher Jack Chen was awarded a US Patent, “Methods and Compositions for Enriching Non-Host Sequences in Host Samples.” The patent describes a new technique to greatly amplify pathogenic sequences in human clinical samples so they’re easier to detect. This new procedure provides a fast and sequence-independent means to identify the poison needle in the haystack of gene sequences.
ALASKA: Researcher receives NSF funding for wildfire risk reduction
A team headed by Alaska EPSCoR Fire & Ice researcher Jen Schmidt has been funded by the NSF for a Navigating the New Arctic proposal entitled “Socio-ecological considerations for sustainAble Fuel treatments to Reduce wildfire Risk (SAFRR).” The team will work with agencies, Indigenous organizations and communities to co-produce an integrated framework to evaluate fuel treatments; assess treatments’ short-term and long-term ecological effects and influence on wildfire behavior; examine how likely treatments are to be acceptable to residents; and evaluate the ability of alternative fuel treatment designs.
WEST VIRGINIA: New NASA WV Space Grant Consortium and WV EPSCoR Director
NASA WV Space Grant Consortium and the NASA WV Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program announced that its board of directors appointed Dr. Melanie Page as the new Director. She assumed responsibilities on August 1, 2021, and succeeded Dr. Majid Jaridi, who has retired from his 30 years of service leading the organization.
As Director, she will work closely with staff and the board to ensure that program goals are met in an inclusive way while engaging students, teachers, faculty, and other key stakeholders in promoting collaborative research that contributes to NASA’s goals and objectives. Meanwhile, she will oversee the continued expansion of the NASA WV Space Grant Consortium, the NASA WV EPSCoR, and other NASA-funded projects.
MONTANA: Researchers receive $294,000 NIFA grant to research bile acids
New research at Montana State University will examine if foods that are rich in fiber, such as lentils, can help lower unhealthy bile acid levels in the body, which are associated with a range of obesity-related diseases afflicting approximately one-third of U.S. adults.
The research by Mary Miles in MSU’s Department of Health and Human Development is supported by a $294,000, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA. MSU chemistry and biochemistry professor Brian Bothner, who is also scientific director of the Proteomics, Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry Facility and director of Montana INBRE, is co-principal investigator on the project.
The research, “Therapeutic Impacts of Dietary Pulses on Bile Acids,” is one of 29 projects that collectively received a total of more than $8.5 million in funding from NIFA. The research and Extension grants are part of NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative and are intended to advance solutions to critically important problems in U.S. agriculture.
DELAWARE: INBRE receives new confocal microscope
An NIH S10 High-End Instrumentation (HEI) Grant Program was awarded for the Dragonfly spinning disc confocal microscope with 3D localization-based super resolution capabilities.
Delaware INBRE Co-Director of the Centralized Research Instrumentation Core, Dr. Jeff Caplan, was awarded the S10 grant in early 2021.
The new microscope is set to arrive in August of 2021.