Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Resilient Rural Infrastructure (RRI)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.Rural areas in the U.S. are home to sixty million people, occupy 97% of the land area, and supply the bulk of the nation's food and natural resources. The overarching goal of the proposed activity is to understand and positively impact the significant physical and human infrastructure needs of rural U.S. communities through research supporting the design, development, and implementation of resilient rural infrastructure. One of the challenges in conducting large-scale research is to simultaneously ensure significant potential impact while keeping the studies tractable so as to not overwhelm resources. In this planning grant, various types of rural communities will be targeted such as: communities in the southeast U.S., Puerto Rico, and Native American communities within the Great Plains. These communities and the educational institutions that support them will be targeted in order to increase the participation of groups and geographic regions that are too often underrepresented in STEM disciplines.The primary objective of this project is to leverage the resources of a planning grant to develop and nurture relationships with the stakeholder community in a deliberate, early-stage process in an effort to develop a research team that is well poised to successfully compete for an Engineering Research Center addressing a highly complex, high-societal impact challenge. Inadequate and failing rural infrastructure is an important though arguably overlooked problem of national significance requiring center-scale, converging engineering research. If successful, this will be the nation's first-ever center dedicated primarily to the study and improvement of rural infrastructure. The goal is to develop a convergent research team of multidisciplinary subject-matter experts to successfully reengineer the nation's rural infrastructure. However, the current team is lacking stakeholders from the target rural communities and the educational institutions that support them (largely primary and secondary schools and local junior colleges). The team will also explore additional areas of expertise needed to address the this complex challenge (e.g., public health, public policy).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.