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

工程研究中心规划奖助金竞赛是作为ERC计划的试点征集活动进行的。计划拨款不是ERC全面竞赛的一部分，而是为了培养团队规划汇聚的中央规模工程研究的能力。美国农村地区有6000万人口，占据97%的土地面积，供应全国大部分食物和自然资源。拟议活动的总体目标是通过支持设计、开发和实施有弹性的农村基础设施的研究，了解并积极影响美国农村社区重要的物质和人力基础设施需求。进行大规模研究的挑战之一是同时确保重大的潜在影响，同时保持研究的可控性，以免资源不堪重负。在这项规划拨款中，将针对各种类型的农村社区，例如：美国东南部、波多黎各的社区，以及大平原内的美洲原住民社区。这些社区和支持他们的教育机构将成为目标，以增加在STEM学科中往往代表性不足的群体和地理区域的参与。该项目的主要目标是利用规划拨款的资源，在深思熟虑的早期过程中发展和培育与利益相关者社区的关系，努力发展一支能够成功竞争工程研究中心的研究团队，以应对高度复杂、高度社会影响的挑战。农村基础设施不足和失灵是一个重要的问题，但可以说是被忽视了，这是一个对国家具有重大意义的问题，需要进行集中的中央规模的工程研究。如果成功，这将是美国第一个主要致力于研究和改善农村基础设施的中心。其目标是发展一支由多学科主题专家组成的汇聚的研究团队，以成功地重新设计国家的农村基础设施。然而，目前的队伍缺乏来自目标农村社区和支持他们的教育机构(主要是小学、中学和当地专科学校)的利益攸关方。该团队还将探索应对这一复杂挑战所需的其他专业领域(例如，公共卫生、公共政策)。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.