Three new seed grants kickstart high impact research and education in Kansas

This month, Kansas NSF EPSCoR announced three new Research and Education Innovation (REI) Awards. These powerful seed grants are designed to spur homegrown ingenuity at Kansas universities, setting the stage for enabling nationally successful federally funded projects.

Each award provides up to $50,000 for nine months of innovative endeavors tied to the the ARISE project (Adaptive and Resilient Infrastructures driven by Social Equity). Recipients from Kansas State University and the University of Kansas, are tackling high-impact topics, ranging from AI learning modules for children to community resilience.

Funding for these seed grants comes from the five-year ARISE initiative, backed by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) and the Kansas Board of Regents. This initiative aims to strengthen research excellence in regions historically overlooked for federal investment—and it’s working, with every dollar in EPSCoR funding helping bring in more than double in additional federal research support.

Fall 2025 REI Award Recipients

Nonprofits as Third-Party Governance Actors in Community Resilience by Rachel Krause and Hala Altamimi, University of Kansas

Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Educational Module for K-5 by Lior Shamir and Safia Malallah, Kansas State University

CLARA: County-Level AI for Resilience and Assistance by Balasubramaniam Natarajan and Rahul Madbhavi, Kansas State University