Success Stories

The University of Iowa has been awarded a $6 million, four-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to lead a multistate collaboration with universities, local governments, health care providers, and other experts on a project that will help Midwest agricultural communities grappling with effects of severe weather, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves.

A network of small, low-cost sensors invented by UI researchers will be placed in local fields and neighborhoods across Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Arkansas to gather measurements of soil temperature and moisture, air temperature, relative humidity and surface pressure, and other weather and soil data points. These measurements will be used to produce model forecasts of weather that will be delivered in real time to individuals in ag-communities via phone apps and interactive on-demand virtual systems.

Through local partnerships and data training, the hyper localized forecasts will help individuals and communities in a variety of ways:

• Manage water usage and agricultural field operations.
• Recognize when and where environmental factors such as heat waves or smoke from wildfire are harmful to health.
• Strategically use resources to mitigate heat stress, such as by building greenspaces.
• Grow the local workforce by instilling technical skills and demand for data analytics, operation of unmanned arial vehicles, irrigation systems, and elements of precision agriculture intended to create more economically resilient communities.

“This significant NSF award underscores the University of Iowa’s role in creating engineering solutions to address critical issues facing our rural communities. Through collaborations such as these we can continue to raise the bar in transformative research, benefiting all Iowans,” says Ann McKenna, dean of the UI College of Engineering.

January 29, 2024

A statewide effort led by LSU has won the largest grant ever awarded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, providing up to $160 million to support Louisiana’s energy industry, create jobs, and develop the energy workforce.

The NSF Engines grant, announced earlier today in Washington, D.C., focuses on energy transition and decarbonization of Louisiana’s industrial corridor.

Louisiana’s team, called Future Use of Energy in Louisiana, or FUEL, includes private energy companies, universities, community and technical colleges, and state agencies that will work together to drive technology and workforce development in support of Louisiana’s energy industry.

“Leading the FUEL team and being selected for this transformational grant affirms what we already knew – that LSU is one of the nation’s premier research universities, poised to change the lives of the people of Louisiana and the world,” LSU President William F. Tate IV said. “By teaming up with our partners across the state in education, industry and government, we are leveraging the intellectual capital of our state’s best and brightest to make a difference for the energy industry and for the people of every parish in Louisiana.”

Aug. 5, 2024 | LITTLE ROCK — The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and the Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) are collaborating on a yearlong project to make decades of maternal health research readily available for future researchers.

The project is funded by a $310,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in the form of a supplemental award to Lawrence E. Cornett, Ph.D., a distinguished professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Physiology and Cell Biology.

Cornett directs the Arkansas IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) program, which since 2001 has been building a biomedical research infrastructure across the state that includes programs for undergraduate students and faculty.

The $310,000 award is a supplement to the five-year $18.4 million NIH Institutional Development Award (IDeA) grant that continues the Arkansas INBRE program. The grant supplement will allow scientists at UA Fayetteville and ACRI to collaborate on the development of software tools and analytical processes to streamline the production and analysis of a large maternal health dataset that ACRI has been collecting.

The Commonwealth of Kentucky will receive $20 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This program aims to support U.S. states and territories, also known as EPSCoR jurisdictions, that have historically received less funding for research and development.

Through the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program Track-1, Kentucky has been awarded five years of funding to study how climate change affects local communities. The project will allow researchers to find new ways to deal with these challenges, educate the community and create programs to teach future researchers.

Kentucky faces mounting threats from environmental change, including extreme weather events, floods, droughts and landslides. The Climate Resilience through Multidisciplinary Big Data Learning, Prediction & Building Response Systems (CLIMBS) project will advance the fields of climate science, geohazards engineering and disaster management to improve sustainability and resilience to climate change. Research and educational programs will benefit underserved communities in eastern Kentucky. 

"We are proud to invest in Kentucky's future through the CLIMBS project, which aims to enhance climate resilience and sustainability across industries," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "By focusing on science-driven solutions, Kentucky can address climate challenges, protect communities and bolster economic growth for communities across the commonwealth and throughout the region."

Led by the University of Kentucky, scientists from eight universities will use Big Data, artificial intelligence and machine learning to model the impact of different climate scenarios. CLIMBS will help build climate resilience and sustainability in Kentucky's key industries of manufacturing, data analytics, energy transition and engineering and help train a science and engineering workforce that will enable the growth of smaller industries, such as food and beverage and agriculture. 

CLIMBS is responsive to Kentucky's Vision 2030: Science & Technology Plan, which includes a major focus on climate and resiliency and is motivated by the flood and weather events in 2021 and 2022 that impacted the area, including impoverished mountain and rural communities. Along with improving education and outreach in Appalachia, CLIMBS will promote the development of university-industry partnerships and enhanced abilities to compete for center-level funding and commercialization.  

LAWRENCE — The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the University of Kansas $26 million to establish a new Gen-4 Engineering Research Center (ERC) — Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub (EARTH) — that will create a sustainable and circular refrigerant economy.

NSF’s Engineering Research Centers bring universities and businesses together to strengthen the competitive position of American industry in the global marketplace.

“NSF's Engineering Research Centers ask big questions in order to catalyze solutions with far-reaching impacts,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said. “NSF Engineering Research Centers are powerhouses of discovery and innovation, bringing America's great engineering minds to bear on our toughest challenges. By collaborating with industry and training the workforce of the future, ERCs create an innovation ecosystem that can accelerate engineering innovations, producing tremendous economic and societal benefits for the nation.”

KU’s ERC EARTH was selected from among hundreds of proposed centers.

“Working closely with industry partners, EARTH will have the resources and expertise to solve the technical, environmental and economic challenges required to create a sustainable refrigerant lifecycle that will benefit Kansans, the nation and the world. In doing this work, the center is a prime example of how the University of Kansas is driving economic development in Kansas," said Douglas A. Girod, University of Kansas chancellor.

KU is well positioned to lead this effort.

In March 2024, the University of Idaho received (award number P20GM152304) a $11 million, five-year grant to establish a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) program focused on nutrition and women’s health. This grant is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a component of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH’s Office of Women’s Health and Office of Nutrition Research are also partners.

The NIH’s overarching goal with this and all COBRE grants is to “support the establishment and development of innovative, state-of-the-art biomedical and behavioral research centers at institutions in Institutional Development Award (IDeA)-eligible states through awards for three sequential five-year phases.” IDeA-eligible states are those with the least NIH funding, and Idaho ranks nearly at the bottom of all states in this regard.

The first five years (phase 1) of this award will focus on building capacity in the area of nutrition and women’s health at the University of Idaho, including (1) attracting, mentoring and supporting a critical mass of both emerging and established world-class investigators who are able to compete effectively for independent, federal research funding and (2) improving infrastructure in the area of nutrition and women’s health at the University of Idaho.

Research will be broad, interdisciplinary, collaborative and innovative in the areas of nutrition and women’s health. It will span the entire lifespan and be inclusive of all nutrients and food bioactives important for health. Both undernutrition and obesity will be considered, as will a broad range of health outcomes, such as fertility, eating disorders, nutrient deficiencies, chronic disease and mental health.

Leading the COBRE are Shelley McGuire (COBRE principal investigator/project director, professor of nutrition and director of the Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences), Mark McGuire (COBRE associate director, university distinguished professor) and Janet Williams (COBRE director of the Nutrition Analytics Core Laboratory, senior research scientist).

The National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded an estimated $21.4 million five-year grant to the University of Alabama at Birmingham for an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

People born in the Deep South have a 20 percent to 30 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. In 2020, UAB became an exploratory ADRC to advance research in dementia disparities in the region. The new grant allows the team to extend its research efforts.

“We hope to use the data collected through the ADRC to translate research findings into advances in the care, treatment and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia,” said Erik Roberson, M.D., Ph.D., Rebecca Gale-Heersink endowed chair in the UAB Department of Neurology and the center director.

Diabetes affects 10% of Hawaiʻi‘s population, with another 37% living with pre-diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association. To address this significant health issue, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) secured a $11.7 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) five-year grant renewal for its Diabetes Research Center, originally funded with $11.3 million in 2017.

“Living in Hawaiʻi, many of us have diabetes or know someone who has it, so it is our obligation as researchers in Hawaiʻi to investigate problems that affect the people of this state,” said Mariana Gerschenson, JABSOM associate dean for research and director of the Diabetes Research Center. “The renewal of this grant allows us to continue to do this critical research, and we are excited about starting Phase 2 of this research, which will explore the impact diabetes has on other parts of the body.”

Originally, the NIH-funded Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant enabled JABSOM to study the mechanisms behind diabetes and pre-diabetes using cell and animal models. This initiative also facilitated the training of five young investigators across UH Mānoa to continue to contribute to local research and education.

“This is a very exciting time for us to have the opportunity to give young people in Hawaiʻi an opportunity to study this abundant disease and its complications here at home,” said Majorie Mau, the center’s deputy director and professor in the Department of Native Hawaiian Health.

An ideal thickness for studying certain rocks and minerals underneath a microscope is 0.03 mm, or roughly one one-thousandth of an inch (also known as one thou). Put another way, it takes 1,000 thous to make one inch.

Dr. John Webster, a Geosciences researcher and professor at Minot State University, received almost $33,000 from ND EPSCoR's STEM Research and Education program in 2022 to purchase a new precision thin-section machine that cuts stones thin enough for him and his students to discern mineral and chemical composition. ND EPSCoR's STEM Research and Education program is funded through appropriated funds from the ND state legislature to support STEM across North Dakota.

The Buehler PetroThin, as it’s called, is a thin section machine with a PetroBond thin section fixture that ensures parallelism of cutting and grinding procedures. The technology that creates thin sections isn’t new, but it’s essential to the work Webster performs as both a researcher and a lecturer. Thin-section study using a petrographic microscope is the standard technique for detailed study of rocks and minerals. It helps researchers describe rocks in great detail, including their mineral composition to better understand how they formed.

“It allows us to characterize rocks in new ways and interpret how rocks were formed,” Webster said. “It really is a fundamental, really important approach to studying geological materials. Even if we have good hand lenses (magnifiers), it’s difficult to identify minerals and see the textures. With thin slices like this, it really is how we characterize rocks and understand what they're made of in terms of minerals.”

From touch recognition and sensing that allows us to type messages on smartphones to carbon nanotube-based sensors that can track changes in our movement, the University of Delaware produces world-class ideas as one of the country’s top universities for research activity.

But it takes more than a great idea to make an impact — researchers also need institutional infrastructure, support staff and entrepreneurial skills in order to find the most effective way to bring their great ideas and technologies to life.

Now, UD will be empowered to increase the speed and scale of its translational research as a member of the inaugural cohort of 18 institutions supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Accelerating Research Translation (ART) program.

"NSF endeavors to empower academic institutions to build the pathways and structures needed to speed and scale their research into products and services that benefit the nation," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "The Accelerating Research Translation program in NSF’s new Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate identifies, and champions institutions positioned to expand their research translation capacity by investing in activities essential to move results to practice."

This effort will be led by PI Jill Higginson, George W. Laird Professor of Mechanical Engineering in UD’s College of Engineering and director of UD’s Institute of Engineering Driven Health (IEDH). Co-PIs include Julius Korley, associate vice president of UD’s Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships (OEIP) and co-director of the NSF I-Corps Hub: Northeast Region, Tracy Shickel, associate vice president of corporate engagement, and Dan Freeman, associate professor of marketing in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and director of Horn Entrepreneurship.