10 ARISE Innovation Awards in 2025
Kansas NSF EPSCoR announced 10 new Research and Education Innovation (REI) Awards in 2025. These $50,000 awards are designed to spark homegrown ingenuity at Kansas universities, initiating high-impact research for Kansas.
The ARISE project has now awarded 23 total seed grants since its launch in 2022.
Funding for these seed grants comes from the five-year ARISE initiative, which stands for Adaptive and Resilient Infrastructures driven by Social Equity. This major statewide initiative is backed by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) and the Kansas Board of Regents. With the aim of strengthening research excellence in regions historically overlooked for federal investment, this effort has successfully returned more than double in federal research support for Kansas.
2025 REI Award Recipients:
Yoonjung Ahn, Assistant Professor of Geography & Atmospheric Science, University of Kansas, Manufactured Housing Residents’ Air Quality Exposures and Perspectives
Matthew Howland, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Wichita State University, Documenting and Disseminating History and Mortuary Segregation at Highland Cemetery
Nishit Shetty, Assistant Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Kansas, Characterizing the fungal microbiome in indoor air and stormwater to improve resiliency to mold.
Rachel Krause and Hala Altamimi, University of Kansas, Nonprofits as Third-Party Governance Actors in Community Resilience by
Lior Shamir and Safia Malallah, Kansas State University, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Educational Module for K-5
Balasubramaniam Natarajan and Rahul Madbhavi, Kansas State University, CLARA: County-Level AI for Resilience and Assistance
George T. Amariucai, Kansas State University, Conversational, Context-Aware, Adaptive Surveys: An AI-Driven Platform to Expand Human Data Collection Capacity across Kansas Institutions
Visvakumar Aravinthan, Lokesh Das, Wichita State University, Jason Bergtold, Kansas State University, and Madison Graham, University of Kansas, Quantify Voluntary Load Reduction to Enhance System Resilience for Resource Adequacy Events
Xiaoheng Wang and Quan Lei, Wichita State University, Assessing Local Government Decision-Making for Resilient and Equitable Infrastructure
Jason Bergtold Kansas State University and Madison Graham University of Kansas, Behavioral Experiments to Assess Behavioral Intentions of Kansas Residents