ART Track-2: GROW: Identifying and Nurturing Vermont Emerging Strategic Technologies (INVEST)

The University of Vermont (UVM) will create a new university-wide initiative, INVEST (Identifying and Nurturing Vermont’s Emerging Strategic Technologies), designed to provide the intellectual environment, training, and resources needed to create tangible societal benefits from academic research. A primary goal is to contribute to the economic vibrancy of rural communities, which often struggle to attract and retain the talent, infrastructure and critical resources needed to creatively build healthy innovation economies. By expanding the scope of graduate education outside of a strictly academic focus, the INVEST initiative will contribute to recruitment and retention of students into non-academic local positions post-graduation, thereby growing the knowledge-economy workforce in the region. With INVEST support, new discoveries in UVM’s research labs will be more easily and quickly converted into useful applications, products, and tools, supporting Vermont’s nascent but growing technology sectors in areas that are essential for addressing the unique needs of a small, highly rural state with an aging population. The ART Program, supported by the NSF TIP Directorate, seeks to advance U.S. scientific and economic leadership by building capacity and increasing the number of robust translational research ecosystems in Institutions of Higher Education that span across the full geography of our nation. 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.