CC*Strategy-Region: Southwest Higher Education Knowledge and Technology Exchange (SHEKATE) Regional Planning

The demand for regional scale thinking and planning by leadership organizations is now an essential element in rebuilding research infrastructure. The cyberinfrastructure needed to deploy vast and complex sensor networks, adopt high capacity middle mile services for remote instruments such as telescopes, and expand connectivity into isolated, rural, and expensive locations where data acquisition is needed to better understand fire, water, and climate impacts is an essential element of the research ecosystem. SHEKATE’s collaborative planning events introduce and connect researchers from the region’s research universities to cross state and international boundaries and work with federal and state broadband initiatives to establish a new research core across the region. Led by Arizona State University (ASU), the Sun Corridor Network (SCN), NevadaNet, the Nevada Higher Education Network (NSHE) and the Utah Education and Telehealth Network (UETN) as planning leads, SHEKATE conference events focus on researcher enabled solutions in the field requiring new levels of collaboration and the use of innovative technologies to bring networks, high performance computing, and improved science workflows to isolated (and often expensive) locations in rural and urban areas. Science in the American West regularly includes significant multi-state studies in water, fire, agriculture, land use, climate, and geology. Field research is generally an ad hoc cyberinfrastructure supported by faculty, graduate students, and rarely systemically by central information technology organizations. SHEKATE’s regional workshops continue to focus discussions on gaps in the use of technology, the lack or deficiency of staffing, and the types and deficiencies of research centric interconnections needed for projects that cross state or international boundaries. SHEKATE continues to discover, engage, and reconcile the need for regional scale solutions for intra state research. 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.