Four research projects join statewide push for a disaster resilient Kansas

Kansas NSF EPSCoR recently announced it is investing $200,000 to fund four new research projects dedicated to enhancing community resilience across the state.

These one-year seed grants, valued at roughly $50,000 each, are designed to spark homegrown ingenuity and initiate high-impact research tailored to the unique needs of Kansans.

Lead investigators on these projects include electrical engineer Visvakumar Arivinthan at Wichita State University, who is targeting critical needs for the energy sector in his two projects. With his collaborators, he seeks to give lithium-based batteries a second life and create a tool for utility companies to gauge economic benefits of natural gas storage during severe weather events.

Data scientist Shruti Kshirgar (WSU) is tackling tornado damage assessment with her project. As one of Kansas’ most destructive natural hazards, surveying tornado damage is a slow and costly process. She is using artificial intelligence to create a damage-mapping dashboard with an array of resources of use to emergency managers.   

Community health expert Christina Pacheco of the University of Kansas Medical Center will use her project to give 10 students experience as Community Health Workers in their hometowns of Kansas. Learn more about applying to her program.

These projects are supported by Research and Education Innovation (REI) Awards. All are funded by ARISE (Adaptive and Resilient Infrastructures driven by Social Equity), a statewide initiative backed by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) and the Kansas Board of Regents.

Since its launch in 2022, ARISE has invested in 28 seed grants totaling more than $1.4 million. Investing in regions historically overlooked for federal funding—like Kansas—has proven to be a highly effective strategy for NSF, successfully returning more than double that amount in federal research support to the state of Kansas.

2026 Research & Education Innovation Award Recipients

Visvakumar Aravinthan, Department Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wichita State University, with co-investigator Davi Soares, Enhancing community energy resilience via an AI-driven framework for second-life Li-metal batteries.

Visvakumar Aravinthan, Department Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with co-investigator Arun-Kaarthick Manoharan of Wichita State University, and collaborators Bala Natarajan and Jason Bergtold at Kansas State University and Justin Hutchison at the University of Kansas, Resilience Performance and Value of a Transmission Planning Assessment Tool.

Shruti Kshirsagar, Assistant Professor of Data Science, Wichita State University, Equity-Aware AI for Tornado Damage Assessment Using Sentinel-1/2 Imagery and the xBD Global Disaster Dataset.

Christina Pacheco, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Kansas Medical Center, Partnerships for Resilience and Emergency Preparedness through Academic Resident Engagement.