History
Impacting Kansas since 1992
For more than 30 years, Kansas scientists have leveraged NSF EPSCoR investments and become more competitive in acquiring federal funding, especially in areas critical to the state’s long-term science and technology priorities.
Our return on investment says it all. For every dollar pumped into research by NSF EPSCoR, Kansas scientists have secured more than double that in other research funding.
NSF EPSCoR Investments in Kansas
2022 – 2027 (NSF Award No. OIA-2148878) PI: Belinda Sturm, Adaptive and Resilient Infrastructures driven by Social Equity (ARISE)
2017 – 2022 (NSF Award No. OIA-1656006) PI: Kristin Bowman-James, Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas (MAPS)
2009 – 2017 (NSF Award No. EPS-0903806) PI: Kristin Bowman-James, Phase VI: Climate Change and Energy: Basic Science, Impacts, and Mitigation Science
2006 – 2009 (NSF Award No. EPS-0553722) PI: Kristin Bowman-James, Phase V: Building Research Infrastructure to Address Grand Challenge Problems in Ecological Forecasting and Biomaterials Design
2003 – 2006 (NSF Award No. 0236913) PI: Kristin Bowman-James, Phase IV: Improvement of the Academic Research Infrastructure
1999 – 2004 (NSF Award No.9874732) PI: Thomas Taylor, Phase III: Improvement of the Academic Research Infrastructure
1995 – 1999 (NSF Award No. 9550487) PI: Theodore Kuwana, Kansas EPSCoR Improvement Program
1992 -1996 (NSF Award No. 9255223) PI: Theodore Kuwana, K*STAR Grant for Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research in Kansas
2023-2027 (NSF Award No. 2316295) PI: Melanie Derby, MICRA: Supporting rural livelihoods in the water-stressed Central High Plains: Microbial innovations for climate-resilient agriculture
2022-2026 (NSF Award No. 2119753) PI: Vaishali Sharda, BioWRAP: Bioplastics With Regenerative Agricultural Properties
2021 – 2025 (NSF Award No. 2119754) PI: Bala Subramaniam, Advanced Manufacturing of Renewable and Recyclable Polymers
2020-2024 (NSF Award No. 2019603) PI: Amy Burgin, Aquatic Intermittency Effects on Microbiomes in Streams (AIMS)
2019 – 2023 (NSF Award No. 1920946) PI: A. Townsend Peterson, Marshalling Diverse Big Data Streams to Understand Risk of Tick-Borne Diseases in the Great Plains
2018 – 2022 (NSF Award No. 1826820) PI: Stephen Welch, Building Field-Based Ecophysiological Genome-to-Phenome Prediction
2016 – 2020 (NSF Award No. 1632892) PI: Edward Peltier, Improving Water Management, Treatment and Recovery in Oil and Gas Production
2015 – 2019 (NSF Award No. 1539105) PI: Bala Subramaniam, Catalysis for Renewables: Applications, Fundamentals and Technologies (CRAFT)
2014 – 2017 (NSF Award No. IIA-1430493) PI: Kristin Bowman-James, Collaborative Research: Imaging and Controlling Ultrafast Dynamics of Atoms, Molecules, and Nanostructures
2009 – 2012 (NSF Award No. EPS-0553722) PI: Kristin Bowman-James, Collaborative Research: EPSCoR RII Track 2 Oklahoma and Kansas: A cyberCommons for Ecological Forecasting
2021-2023 (NSF Award No. 2033210) PI: Kapildeb Ambal, WSU, Metrology and spectroscopy of individual nanomagnets? dynamics using quantum sensor-based (NV- center) nano-magnetometry
2019-2020 (NSF Award No. 1929187) PI: Gisuk Hwang, Tailored Flow Boiling Mechanisms Using 3D Printed Multifuncitonal Wick Structures
2019-2020 (NSF Award No. 1929147) PI: Hongyu Wu, Robust Matrix Completion State Estimation in Low-Observability Distribution Systems under False Data Injection Attacks
2018 -2019 (NSF Award No. 1833025) PI: Abigail Langston, Using Novel Applications of Luminescence Techniques to Evaluate Channel Mobility and Bedrock Valley Development
2018-2019 (NSF Award No. 1833087) PI: James Blakemore, Pulse Radiolysis Studies of H2 Generation by [Cp*Rh] Complexes to Characterize Design Rules for Improved Catalysts
2018-2019 (NSF Award No. 1833048) PI: Xianglin Li, Pore-Scale Transport Phenomena in Li-O2 Battery Electrodes Characterized by Nano-Tomography
2017-2018 (NSF Award No. 1738708) PI: Katie Mitchell-Koch, Electronic Structure Calculations to Characterize Mechanisms of Regioselective Additions to Olefins and to Advance P-31 NMR as a Reporter of Catalytic Intermediates
2017-2018 (NSF Award No. 1738757) PI: Jocelyn McDonald, Dynamic Live Imaging and Manipulation of Migrating Collectives Inside Tissues
2010 – 2012 (NSF Award No. EPS-1006860) PI: Kristin Bowman-James, Prairie Light: Next Generation Networking for Mid-continent Science
Timeline
1979
EPSCoR is born! The U.S. National Science Foundation created the "Experimental (now Established) Program to Stimulate Competitive Research" (EPSCoR) in response to concerns that federal research and education dollars were being unevenly distributed across the nation.
1992
Kansas secures its first NSF EPSCoR grant after a rigorous merit-review process.
1993
EPSCoR extends beyond NSF to the National Institute of Health (NIH) Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program. Other federal agencies offer similar programs, such as the Department of Defense (which has DEPSCoR), the Department of Energy, NASA, and USDA.
1995 - 2022
Kansas secures 8 major NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 awards.
RII Track-1 refers to NSF's major research infrastructure improvement (RII) award. These multi-million-dollar awards were cooperative agreements between federal and state partners that required a financial match from the state. They were designed to build research capacity and competitiveness across the entire state.
For Kansas, these projects enhanced research, physical infrastructure, and talent in priority areas for the state, including drought resistant crops and microbiome-enriched soil, as well as ecological forecasting and adapting to climate change.
2017
Congress renames EPSCoR as an established instead of experimental program. The far-reaching, geographically dispersed impacts of EPSCoR have been well documented in multiple assessments.
2022 - 2027
Kansas secures its final RII Track-1 project, called ARISE, which seeks adaptive and resilient infrastructures driven by social equity.
2024
NSF retires the Track-1 program along with all other Track programs to adopt a new investment strategy aimed at fostering the research ecosystem within each jurisdiction.
Workforce Development
