NSF announces 6 new EPSCoR Track-1 awards to expand the geography of innovation across the nation

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded six jurisdictions $20 million each through ESPCoR, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, a program that aims to build and bolster infrastructure to advance scientific progress and elevate discovery nationwide.  

“For the United States to remain the global leader in science, engineering and technology, we must energize talent in every region and every state in our nation. Through EPSCoR, NSF catalyzes the development of research capabilities across the country, creating sustainable scientific infrastructure and communities of innovation,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “This year’s EPSCoR awards will serve individual states and the country as a whole with critical research on wildfire management, climate change resilience, biomanufacturing and advanced biomedical devices, and data science in the service of all disciplines.” 

The five-year Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-1 awardees will pursue ambitious research that addresses the impact of climate change on energy-water systems, biomanufacturing, wildfire management, using artificial intelligence to revolutionize health care and transdisciplinary research into transformative language-based data science.  

The  awardees and summary of each project are listed below: 

Iowa – Building Capacity Across Iowa to Meet Human Needs From Things That Grow.  
Referred to as “Chemurgy 2.0,” this project aims for Iowa to become an advanced biomanufacturing leader by building and integrating research capacity in biosciences and advanced manufacturing, 3D-printing and composite fabrication processes. 

Idaho – Idaho Community-engaged Resilience for Energy-Water Systems (I-CREWS).  
This project will advance a system of innovative solutions and capacity-building to proactively address the impacts of climate, population and technological change on energy-water systems. 

Montana – Integrating Montana’s Environmental Research With Smart Sensors (IMERSS). 
The Western U.S. is under increasing wildfire threat. This statewide project will transform the understanding of prescribed fire dynamics and the impact of prescribed fire on Montana’s communities and public lands. 

South Carolina – ADAPT in SC: AI-enabled Devices for the Advancement of Personalized and Transformative Healthcare in South Carolina. 
The vision of this project is to build research capacity at the nexus of artificial intelligence, life and social sciences, and bioengineering through fundamental research, education, workforce development and industry partnerships. 

Vermont – Harnessing the Data Revolution for Vermont: The Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS). 
This project will advance initiatives grounded in principled methods through the quantitative measurement of sentiment and stories across a diverse portfolio of corpora. It will also provide new insights into the power and use of stories and narratives across a broad array of social, economic and health domains through integrated data and teams.   

West Virginia – West Virginia Network for Functional Neuroscience and Transcriptomics (WV-NFNT). 
The scientific vision of this project is to transform neuroscience research in West Virginia by establishing connections and enabling access to the technologies and expertise needed for high-resolution structure-function studies. 

To learn more about NSF’s ESPCoR, visit nsf.gov/epscor.