Montana NASA EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Development (RID) Augmentation 2020-2021

Since the beginning of the NASA EPSCoR program in Montana in 1994, great strides have been made in developing and coordinating Montana research activities aimed at solving current technical and scientific problems facing NASA and the aerospace community. These accomplishments and their resulting infrastructure have given many Montana researchers opportunities to work with NASA that were not present prior to the implementation of NASA EPSCoR program. Due to the success achieved thus far, the goals for the Montana NASA EPSCoR RID program will remain consistent with those of the earlier program.

The general Montana NASA EPSCoR goals are: 1. Bring the capabilities of Montana’s nationally competitive researchers to the attention of NASA. 2. Build infrastructure to enhance Montana’s capabilities and expertise in areas of importance to NASA, focusing on institutions of higher learning. 3. Use EPSCoR sponsored research to strengthen partnerships with Montana’s high-tech companies and drive the growth of Montana's aerospace-related economy. 4. Focus on building nationally prominent, competitive research groups at Montana's major universities while also providing collaborative opportunities to faculty members at smaller institutions. Our RID-Specific goal is: Help boost the research programs of Montana higher education faculty research in areas that match scientific and technical problems of importance to NASA to a new level of national prominence, enabling them to compete successfully for regular NASA research funding.

The Montana RID program includes Research Initiation Grants, Travel Grants, and administrative costs. Research Initiation Grants are competitively awarded to junior Montana faculty to initiate research programs that will develop research and technology that is important to NASA. Funding requests are allowed up to $50,000 in year two and up to $60,000 in year three. We support two awards each year. Travel Grants are for Montana researchers to visit NASA Centers and other locations associated with their NASA-related research. We fund up to $1,000 per visit.

For this augmentation, we primarily add funds to the Research Initiation category. However, due to the reduction of the cost share requirement from 1:1 to 50%, we had to move much of our administration costs from cost share on to the NASA request. This is due to the fact that we will not receive nearly the amount of return in indirect costs with the reduction in cost share. Therefore, we are only able to add about $4,500 in funds to the Research Initiation Grants for year 2 with the $25,000 increase in funds (and we reduced the travel fund by $2,000 and eliminated our supply budget). In year three we are able to add about $25,000 more than usual to the Research Initiation Grants. With this change, we will allow proposals up to $60,000. This increase is important because costs for faculty researchers are going up and we haven’t increased our allowed amount for ten years.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.