REDD News, August 2024

From the office of Vice President Parag Chitnis

Dear Member of the UW Faculty, Staff and Stakeholder Community:

I wish to extend a hearty Cowboy welcome to both new and returning faculty and students to our Fall 2024 semester at UW! This is always an exciting time of year on campus, but I’m especially excited to share with you the opportunities REDD (Research and Economic Development Division) has in store for you this academic year. It was great to meet a number of new faculty members who attended our REDD session at New Faculty Orientation, and I hope to engage with additional new and returning faculty as the semester progresses.

My staff and I continue to expand and refine resources for you across the broad spectrum of research and intellectual property commercialization services REDD has to offer. Our goal is to ensure you have the means maximize your opportunities for successful achievement of the professional and academic goals you are striving for.

For those of you yet unfamiliar with REDD and its many resources, I encourage you to visit us online at https://www.uwyo.edu/research/index.html, where you can get a full view of the many and varied offices, centers, and institutes that make up this critically important division of the University. The website is admittedly packed with a daunting number of pages to navigate, but please know I am committed to make it a priority this fall to streamline the site and make it as easy as possible to find resources and information sought and needed by faculty, staff, students and our community stakeholders!

We are here for students, faculty and staff who want to apply for extramural grant support for research and education, so please do not hesitate to contact us. Our team of research and innovation support services is now overseen by our new Deputy Vice President of Research and Innovation, Arun Pradhan. Arun and I are actively working on building out the staff for the Technology Transfer Office (TTO), which is a critical resource for those seeking opportunities to commercialize the great work they’ve performed here at UW.  UW faculty and scientists were working hard last year in sending more proposals to funding agencies than in the past years. Given the high demand for pre-award services, we are hiring additional staff and streamlining processes in the Pre-Award Services Office, which is located on the second floor of the Bureau of Mines building on the west side of campus. TTO is also located on the same floor. Please visit them if you need any help.

Best of luck to all this Fall Semester!

Sincere regards,

 

Dr. Parag Chitnis, Vice President, Research and Economic Development 

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Latest REDD News

We have filled many appointments, particularly several new directors for offices, centers and institutes, under REDD. These appointments (click on links for news items) include:

• Jay Gatlin, Director of the UW Science Institute (which manages our vaunted Science Initiative program, along with other activities)
• Shawna McBride, formerly interim director, is now the permanent Director of Wyoming EPSCoR/IDEA
• Sarah Collins, newly appointed Director of UW Research Institute at AMK Ranch
• Arundeep Pradhan, Deputy Vice President of Research and Innovation

 

Notable recent grants and awards to highlight the faculty excellence at UW:

• NSF awarded Associate Professor Liping Wang and Associate Professor Dr. Jill Keith funding to make UW an NSF REU site, which enables it to provide paid experiential learning opportunities in controlled environment agriculture. CEA an emerging technology that aims to foster innovation and opportunity within the field of agriculture.
• Assistant Professor Daniel McCoy recently received a $663,750 grant from the U.S. Dept. of Energy to determine how clouds respond to aerosols and to warming in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM).
• Assistant Professor Katelyn Kotlarek received a $500,000 R21 research grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) to study precision medicine for infants with cleft palate.
• A $1M investment from the John P. Ellbogen Foundation is slated to support nuclear energy instruction and the Nuclear Energy Research Center (NERC) in the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources (SER). The gift will be matched dollar for dollar by the state of Wyoming to establish the John P. Ellbogen Foundation Nuclear Energy Research Center Fund.
• Professor Mohammad Piri received a 15-million research award from ACU Energy on enhancement of hydrocarbon recovery from geologic formations using chemical additives and various advanced enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques. The project plan will be executed at the University of Wyoming’s (UW) Center of Innovation for Flow through Porous Media (COIFPM) and will train many graduate students.
• UW’s School of Energy Resources received a DOE grant of $54 million for the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub, which will capture and store at least 50 million metric tons (MT) of anthropogenic CO2 in the first 30 years of operation. It plans to store carbon from the largest proposed direct air capture facility in the Rocky Mountains and one of the nation’s largest trona (soda ash) mines and processing facilities.

Upcoming Events

• UW Giving Day, 2024 is Oct. 23 – As many of you know, Giving Day at UW is a critical time when many of our generous donors help fund endowments for many of the projects, programs, centers and institutes within REDD. What’s been missing on Giving Day in recent years is attention to the endowment of REDD itself, which has a number of funding needs itself! Please keep REDD in mind as a donation target for potential and prospective donors to UW on Giving Day 2024!