NSF ART TRACK 2: GROW: Auburn Research Translation Capacity & Culture Catalyst (ARTC3)

This project will fundamentally reshape Auburn University’s research translation ecosystem and galvanize long term economic and public impact. It will align existing but disconnected institutional resources, pathways, and incentives to grow faculty, staff, and student participation in research translation activities. The project will catalyze an institution-wide ecosystem supporting innovation and research translation of gold standard science in both deep-tech innovation and entrepreneurship with high societal impact. This ART Track 2 project will significantly broaden awareness of and engagement in research translation, increasing the input the investigators’ ecosystem needs to thrive resulting in more invention disclosures, more startup companies founded, more trained operators, and more license agreements executed. The investigators will work with their identified mentor institution to build a more sophisticated technology transfer office and deploy a university-wide ART Ambassador network anchored by a Faculty Innovation Ambassadors program. Venture Studio programming and a LAUNCH Innovation Fund to support Seed Translational Research Projects will help Auburn University entrepreneurs navigate the Valley of Death faced by early-stage university research products and lead to longer lasting, more impactful startup companies founded locally and employing Auburn students and other Alabamians. The leaders of this ART Track 2 project will develop Translational Research Impact Case Files to provide individual promotion and tenure committees with objective measures of research translation success providing a stronger incentive to engage in these pursuits. All project activities will involve innovation- and entrepreneurship-related training for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs growing a skilled workforce and a cohort of future operators. The ART Program, supported by the NSF TIP Directorate, seeks to advance the 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.