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

工程研究中心的规划赠款竞争是作为ERC计划内的试点招标运行。 规划赠款不需要作为ERC竞赛的一部分，但旨在建立团队之间的能力，以规划集中的，中心规模的工程研究。美国的农村地区拥有6000万人口，占土地面积的97%，并提供了国家的大部分食物和自然资源。拟议活动的总体目标是通过研究支持弹性农村基础设施的设计，开发和实施，了解并积极影响美国农村社区的重大物质和人力基础设施需求。 开展大规模研究的挑战之一是，在确保产生重大潜在影响的同时，保持研究易于处理，以免资源不堪重负。在这项规划拨款中，各种类型的农村社区将成为目标，如：美国东南部的社区，波多黎各和大平原内的美洲土著社区。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补助金的资源，以一种深思熟虑的方式，早期阶段的过程，努力发展一个研究团队，是做好准备，成功地竞争一个工程研究中心，解决一个高度复杂的，高社会影响的挑战。农村基础设施不足和失败是一个重要的，但可以说是被忽视的问题，国家的重要性，需要中心规模，融合工程研究。如果成功，这将是该国有史以来第一个主要致力于研究和改善农村基础设施的中心。目标是建立一个由多学科主题专家组成的聚合研究团队，以成功地重新设计国家的农村基础设施。然而，目前的团队缺乏来自目标农村社区和支持他们的教育机构（主要是小学和中学以及地方大专院校）的利益攸关方。该小组还将探索应对这一复杂挑战所需的其他专业领域（例如，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.