Parag Chitnis
Published February 05, 2025
By Parag Chitnis
Best wishes to everyone for 2025! Amid the maelstrom of inevitable change within and beyond the university during 2024, UW’s Research and Economic Development Division has stayed the course with its vision and mission, well positioned for success in the coming year.
Simply put, our mission is to continuously expand UW’s knowledge enterprise while providing the widest array of experiential learning opportunities for UW students possible. This mission is fueled by a relentless pursuit of excellence in world-class research that is relevant to Wyoming’s needs while making UW nationally competitive to obtain extramural funding. The vision is to scale the number of opportunities for not just research, but service, innovation and engagement that support and expand economic prosperity throughout the state of Wyoming. It is an audacious undertaking, but one I firmly believe we are positioned to achieve.
The UW Research and Economic Development Division (REDD) is a complex and far-flung organization. There are no fewer than two dozen offices, centers and institutes that comprise the division, not counting “ancillary” organizations and facilities we support within and beyond the walls of the university. From computer science to microbiology, energy engineering to controlled environment agriculture, astrophysics to animal science, REDD supports an amazing array of scientific inquiry, exploration and achievement. But we do not stop there. Conversion of that incredible output of innovation into real-world applications is critical to our role as a major cog in Wyoming’s economic engine. We facilitate everything from preparation and procurement for research grants to providing critical assistance to fledgling startups being built upon the patents, ideas and innovation spawned out of classrooms and labs at UW.
This past calendar year has borne impressive results for research and development at UW and the entire state of Wyoming. Thanks to the hard work of our faculty, staff and students, our research expenditures are rapidly growing, reaching $167.3 million in fiscal year 2024, an increase of 81 percent over fiscal year 2021. We are supporting more student research experiences now than ever before. We are engaging with more schools, businesses and organizations in Wyoming and are collaborating with more entities in Wyoming now than in the past. We are on an upward trajectory to become a research university that students and Wyomingites can proudly brag about being part of.
In October, we achieved the distinction of being designated an Innovation and Economic Prosperity (IEP) institution by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. This is no small accomplishment. It puts us in somewhat rarified air among the thousands of four-year universities and colleges in the United States. This designation is validation that UW rigorously and effectively engages all of its internal and external stakeholders to understand key issues, track progress, and inform and deliver significant positive contributions to Wyoming’s communities and economy. It is recognition of our incredible ability to contribute to economic growth, opportunity and competitiveness.
In November, the Center of Innovation for Porous Flow Through Media formalized a partnership with scientific instruments leader Thermo Fisher Scientific to co-develop systems to, among other things, tap into previously impervious oil and gas reserves throughout Wyoming. That same partnership has goals and ambitions for improving carbon sequestration methods, optimizing underground water resources, digitalizing geosystems and expanding underground hydrogen storage. Each of these has major implications for the economic future of Wyoming, particularly when it comes to energy resource development.
Of note, our participation in the National Science Foundation’s Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine (CO-WY Engine) yielded a substantial grant to study weather extremes and water security in a project led by UW Professor Bart Geertz (read more here). We also established an exciting new partnership with the Argonne National Laboratory and its Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Lighthouse Initiative, which provides UW student and faculty researchers with access to some of the most powerful and leading-edge computing resources available.
Now that we’re in first quarter of 2025, we have new and renewed ambitions for REDD and its contributions to student success, faculty and graduate research and economic prosperity in communities throughout Wyoming. Our focus remains tightly focused on experiential learning and research excellence.
Parag Chitnis is UW’s vice president for research and economic development.