The Iowa NASA EPSCoR Research Building Seed Grant (RBSG) program encourages, supports, and facilitates the development and enhancement of NASA relevant science and engineering research within the State of Iowa. Funding is intended to build research infrastructure and help Iowa’s academic faculty establish NASA collaboration in order to become nationally competitive for NASA EPSCoR research funding.

Research projects must be in an area that is aligned with a new or continuing NASA research priority or technology need, and the proposal narrative must make an explicit connection with NASA and NASA Mission Directorates goals and objectives as identified in NASA 2018 Strategic Plan and the STEM Education Strategic Plan – 2018. The research agenda of the Iowa NASA EPSCoR Economic Development program supports the goals and objectives of the state as determined by the Iowa Economic Development Authority. The relevant economic sectors for the RBSG include Advanced Manufacturing and Biosciences.

RBSG awards are intended to initiate new or ongoing research collaborations with NASA, and will allow the PI to begin conducting research important to the Agency, as well as support graduate or undergraduate students to develop preliminary data for research. Recipients of this grant will be expected to submit concept papers in the next round of Iowa NASA EPSCoR competitions, and propose to national NASA EPSCoR funding opportunities. The RBSG proposal should include detailed plans for establishing or strengthening links with NASA researchers.

Four Proposals will be selected for $20,000 dollars each. Proposals Due by Sept. 9, 2022. Awards will be announced Sept. 16th, 2022.

View more details and Apply Now 

The Iowa Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)  is a federal-state partnership aimed at increasing Iowa’s national research competitiveness and building research and development capacity in Iowa. The Rapid Response Research(R3) funding is a collaborative effort between NASA EPSCoR programs and NASA mission Directorate Programs, to solve program and mission problems for NASA. The application for funding is an annual competitive process. For the NASA EPSCoR R3 FY2022 funding opportunity three Iowa state researchers and two researchers from the University of Iowa were selected for funding.

Iowa State Department of Aerospace Engineering T.A. Wilson Professor Ashraf Bastawros’ research proposal titled “Deformation and Flow Characterization of Composite Materials for LS-DYNAMIC MAT213 Model” has received funding.

Assistant Professor Todd Kingston of Iowa State’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Professor Jun Cui of Materials Science and Engineering were also among those in Iowa selected for their proposal “Exploiting Hydrodynamic Oscillations of Oscillating Heat Pipes for Thermomagnetic Power Generation from Low-grade Waste Heat”.

University of Iowa’s Assistant professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering Xuan Song’s research proposal “Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC): Additive Manufacturing of Zirconium Carbide using Pressure-assisted Precursor-Binder Jet” also received funding.

Professor Phillip Kaaret and Departmental Chair of University of Iowa’s Physics and Astronomy Department received funding for his research proposal “SMD Astrophysics: Proportional Counter for Absolute X-Ray Flux Calibration”

All award recipients will work with NASA representatives for the next year on the selected research proposals.

Interim Director Dr. Sara Nelson states “We are thrilled NASA has chosen three ISU researchers for this award. We look forward to working closely with NASA on these three innovative research proposals.”

The goal of the R3 program is to develop close collaborations among NASA, industry and university faculty to solve specific and current NASA research challenges. For more information on Rapid Response Research opportunities and further funding opportunities through Iowa EPSCoR click here.

NASA’s Physical Sciences Research Program has selected five ground-based proposals in response to the Physical Sciences Informatics System call for proposals. This program element is part of Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences – 2021 (ROSES-2021) solicitation. These five research projects, involving recognized experts in the fields of combustion science, complex fluids, fluid physics, informatics, and materials science, will use data contained in the PSI system and build on prior reduced-gravity research to advance fundamental research in the physical sciences.

Researchers will investigate important problems with existing data from NASA’s Physical Sciences Informatics (PSI) system. The online database contains data from completed physical science reduced-gravity flight experiments conducted on the International Space Station, Space Shuttle flights, free flying spacecraft, commercial cargo flights to and from the space station, or from related ground-based studies.

One of the selected studies will use In-Space Soldering Investigation (ISSI) experiment to investigate and improve our understanding of how porosity develops in the solder joints, how it is influenced by gravity, and how solder joints properties and functions are affected. The proposed work would apply advanced 3D materials characterization to solder samples from ISSI and non-ISSI compositions. The additional characterization may feedback into the design of the next generation of on-orbit experiments for soldering, essential for future long-duration human exploration missions. This project is led by Prof. Siddartha Pathak (Iowa State University, Ames).

Another selected investigation, seeks to develop the ATOM^TM toolbox, a simple computer vision, data analytics and machine learning tool, to expand the meaning and interpretation of existing microgravity data in the PSI system. The results of the project will provide the means for users to better interact with the data, standardize data output and perform insightful analysis on selected datasets to increase the science readiness of investigations. The project is led by Dr. Ioana Cozmuta (G-Space, Inc).

The selected proposals are from five institutions in five states, with the total combined award amount of approximately $999K during a two-year period.

The Physical Sciences Research Program is managed by the Biological and Physical Sciences Division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. This program conducts fundamental and applied physical sciences research, with the objective of pioneering scientific discovery, enabling space exploration, and providing benefits on Earth. The program furthers fundamental research by investigating the fundamental laws of the universe and physical phenomena in the absence of gravity. The program also conducts applied research, which contributes to the basic understanding underlying space exploration technologies that will further our return to the Moon and our journey to Mars and beyond. Both have led to improved space systems or new products on Earth.

Below is the complete list of the selected proposals, principal investigators, and their organizations:

• Ioana Cozmuta, G-Space, Inc., “Development of a computer vision based toolbox for feature extraction, analysis, modeling and prediction of microgravity data sets”
• Donald Koch, Cornell University, “Dynamic response of particle-filled polymeric fluids in flows with complex Lagrangian time histories”
• Ranga Narayanan, University of Florida, Gainesville, “Reduced-Order Model and Experiments Using the PSI Data from STDCE”
• Siddartha Pathak, Iowa State University, Ames, “Structure, Properties and Performance of Solder Joints in Terrestrial vs. Reduced-Gravity Environments”
• Robert Pitz, Vanderbilt University, “Effect of stretch and curvature on cool flame transitions & structures using tubular flames”

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/biological-physical/nasa-selects-5-proposals-to-provide-new-insights-from-openly-available-data-in-the-physical-sciences-informatics-system

Please welcome the new Interim Director of Iowa NASA EPSCoR, Dr. Sara Nelson! She brings expertise from her work as Assistant Director for Education & Outreach with the Iowa Space Grant Consortium, as well as years as a faculty member of the School of Education. With STEM research, and work with Iowa State Extension in Youth and 4-H, Dr. Nelson will push Iowa NASA EPSCoR forward with her drive for STEM excellence at all levels.

As we welcome Sara, we also bid a fond farewell and a big GOOD LUCK to Tomas Gonzalez-Torres, who has taken a position back with NASA as the Space Grant Project Manager. Tomas will be greatly missed, and we appreciate all of his great effort with the EPSCoR program! Best of luck in your new career!

We are pleased to announce that the Iowa NASA EPSCoR program was awarded with a new Research Infrastructure Development grant! The new award will take us all the way through 2027, helping to provide seed funding and travel grants to further collaborations between our Iowa researchers and NASA!

Science & engineering doctoral candidates, recent PhDs, postdocs, & junior faculty who are U.S. Citizens or legal permanent residents (and a very limited number of Foreign Nationals from non-designated counties) are eligible.

Offered by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, PSSS is a career development experience with a workload of a rigorous 3-hour graduate-level course. Learn the development of a hypothesis-driven planetary science robotic mission in a concurrent engineering environment while getting an in-depth, first-hand look at mission design, life cycle, costs, schedule & the trade-offs inherent in each.

Spend 10 weeks in preparatory webinars acting as a science mission team. Then your final culminating week is mentored by JPL’s Advance Project Design Team to refine your mission concept design & present it to a mock expert review board. The culminating week is typically at JPL, however in 2022 it is likely to be virtual due to Covid-19 pandemic conditions.

See flyer for more information and links!