SC EPSCoR announces 2019 research and collaboration programs grants recipients

SC EPSCoR (South Carolina Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) Program’s main goal is to increase South Carolina’s research capacity by assisting STEM faculty to achieve and sustain large scale federal research funding. The Program provides seed funding programs and supports faculty career development and the development of the STEM student pipeline. In supporting faculty to obtain federal funding, the SC EPSCoR State Office announced the recipients of the 2019 Grants for Exploratory Academic Research (GEAR) Program and the GEAR Collaborative Research Program (GEAR CRP).

The goal of the Grants for Exploratory Academic Research (GEAR) Program is to encourage faculty researchers at South Carolina’s three comprehensive research universities (CRUs), Clemson University, the Medical University of South Carolina, and the University of South Carolina Columbia, to work in a collaboration of at least two faculty member teams per project to compete effectively for research funding to support the research clusters associated with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track 1-Award entitled Materials Assembly and Design Excellence in South Carolina (MADE in SC) – Multi-scale Modeling and Computation Core, Thrust 1 – Optical and Magnetic Materials, Thrust 2 – Stimuli-responsive Polymeric Materials, and Thrust 3 – Interactive Biomaterials.

The goal of the GEAR CRP (Collaborative Research Program) is to encourage faculty researchers at the three South Carolina CRUs and all statewide predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUIs) to build collaborative CRU/PUI academic research teams that will compete effectively for research funding. GEAR CRP grants build and enhance the network of scientists in the state that conduct research related to MADE in SC.

The vision of MADE in SC is to discover and establish new and sustainable approaches for the design and assembly of hierarchical materials at multiple relevant length scales that service South Carolina’s STEM research, education, and workforce needs and invigorate economic development.

Three GEAR awards with a maximum budget of $60,000 each have been made to six researchers:

• Ramakrishna Podila – Lead PI (Clemson University) with MVS Chandrashankar (University of South Carolina), “Advancing Defect-Controlled Nonlinear Optical Properties for Nanocarbon-based Photonic Devices”
• Tarek Shazly – Lead PI (University of South Carolina) with Francis Spinale (UofSC School of Medicine, Columbia), “Optimization of Injectable Biomaterials for Cardiac Applications”
• Lin Zhu – Lead PI (Clemson University) with Yingjie Lao (Clemson University), “Intelligently Designed, Graphene Functionalized, Tunable Optical Metamaterials”

Two GEAR CRP awards with a maximum budget of $60,000 each have been made to five researchers:

• F. Wayne Outten – Lead PI (University of South Carolina) with Nicholas Grossoehme (Winthrop University), “GEAR CRP: Building Stimuli-Responsive Ferritin Protein Nanocages for Biomaterial Applications”
• Jianjun Hu – Lead PI (University of South Carolina) with Ming Hu (University of South Carolina) and Jie Ling (Claflin University), “Deep Learning for Discovery of Noncentrosymmetric Materials with Second-order Nonlinear Optical Behavior”

MADE in SC is supported by the National Science Foundation Award #OIA-1655740.

SC EPSCoR (South Carolina Established Program to Stimulate COmpetitive Research, http://scepscoridea.org/index.html) Program’s main goal is to increase South Carolina’s research capacity by assisting STEM faculty to achieve and sustain large scale federal research funding. SC EPSCoR provides seed funding programs and supports faculty career development and the development of the STEM student pipeline.

MADE in SC (http://scepscoridea.org/MADEinSC/about_MADEinSC.html), Materials Assembly and Design Excellence in South Carolina, is South Carolina’s five-year, $20 million award from the National Science Foundation, managed by the SC EPSCoR office. The focus of this project is materials science broken down into three different research clusters (Thrusts): optical and magnetic materials, stimuli-responsive polymeric materials, and biomaterials. All three are supported by a multi-scale modeling and computation core. This is a multi-faceted project with impacts that will carry far beyond the project’s five years.