NSF Awards Alabama EPSCoR Grant to Develop Katrina Recovery Plan for Education

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The National Science Foundation has awarded the Alabama Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, headquartered at The University of Alabama, a grant to coordinate development of a Hurricane Katrina recovery plan for educational research initiatives damaged within Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Alabama EPSCoR is forming a multi-institution assessment team to evaluate and prioritize needs and devise a recovery plan, said Dr. Keith McDowell, executive director of the program and vice president for research at The University of Alabama.

The $200,000 grant will enable EPSCoR to develop plans which address both short-term needs, such as additional clean-up of damaged research facilities, granting displaced faculty and students access to undamaged laboratories, and assistance with lost or damaged research data, as well as long-term needs, such as reconstruction of laboratories and other research infrastructure.

“The significance of an articulated Katrina research recovery plan for Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana cannot be overstated,” said McDowell. “These states are at the heart of a growing high technology economy in the Southeast and provide not only important new research capacity and innovations, but a science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce.”

One of the hardest hit research facilities in the state is the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and its research stations along the Gulf. Twenty-one of the state’s universities and four-year colleges are member institutions of the lab, which is the state’s marine education and research center. Located on the eastern tip of a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico, the Sea Lab is the home site of the Marine Environmental Sciences Consortium, and schools across the state have researchers working in this part of the Gulf.

The Alabama Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, known as EPSCoR, is a family of competitive, merit-based programs sponsored in Alabama by the state and by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture.

These programs are a federal-state-industrial partnership formed to enhance the science and engineering research, education and technology capabilities of Alabama.

Cooperating partners in Alabama EPSCoR include 27 Alabama colleges and universities, and 175 industrial, federal laboratory, and governmental partners including the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama, the Alabama Development Office and the Alabama Commission on Higher Education.

The state’s research institutions that participate in EPSCoR include The University of Alabama, Alabama A&M University, Auburn University, UAB, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the University of South Alabama and Tuskegee University.