Alabama A&M Physicist to Coordinate $15 million NSF Grant for EPSCOR

Physicist from Member University Alabama A&M to Coordinate $15 million NSF Grant for EPSCOR

An Alabama A&M University physicist who directs its Research Institute has announced a five-year $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help build the state’s ability to participate in, conduct and compete for nanotechnology research.

Dr. Daryush Ila, heads Alabama’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), a seven-school partnership that enables the state to become a more formidable force in conducting and promoting nanotech research. Ila, as executive director of EPSCoR, recently announced that the consortium has been awarded $3 million annually for five years in a cooperative agreement from NSF to boost the state’s research capacity.

“We are setting the pace and creating a road map that will help Alabama become a world class nano/bio-science and sensor presence in the country,” said Ila, adding that the award is among the largest ever awarded a university partnership.

More specifically, the agreement will help continue the work of four current Centers of Excellence: Alabama Center for Nanostructured Materials, (ACNM) headquartered at Tuskegee University; the Center for Environmental Cellular Signal Transduction (CECST), led by Auburn University; the Center for Optical Sensors and Spectroscopies (COSS) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; and the Center for Interdisciplinary Discovery via Engineered Nanofabrication (CIDEN) at Alabama A&M University.

Alabama’s EPSCoR project is comprised of Alabama A&M University, Auburn University, Tuskegee University, the University of Alabama, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of South Alabama. While there are some 27 EPSCoR states, along with programs operating in two U.S. territories, noted Ila, only the Alabama EPSCoR program can boast that two of its centers of excellence are located at historically black college campuses: Alabama A&M and Tuskegee.

Ila said the NSF grant also supports, the ALEPSCoR Education Outreach Initiative (AEOI), an innovative initiative at the University of Alabama, that will ultimately serve 900 students annually.

The major grant award would not have been possible, said Ila, had it not been for the expertise the Alabama EPSCoR program received from the Alabama A&M University Research Institute and SAIC. Their joint assistance enabled EPSCoR to compete as though it were vying for a major contract, he said.
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Source: Partnership for Innovation, Oak Ridge Associated Universities