In FY 2003 NSF provided 149 awards totaling approximately $26 million to 11 institutions in the State of Kansas.
Institutions receiving awards in FY 2003 included the University of Kansas, Pittsburg State University, Fort Hayes State University, Nanoscale Materials, Wichita State University, and BioComp, Inc.
Long-Term Ecological Research in Tallgrass
Prairie — Konza
Prairie, a pristine tallgrass prairie, is
arguably the most intensively studied grassland
site on earth. This 15-year-old, broadly based,
research program at Kansas
State University encompasses studies from
the population, community, ecosystem, and landscape
ecology levels. The central hypothesis is that
fire, grazing, and climatic variability are essential
and responsible for the structure and function
of tallgrass prairie; variability in and switching
among primary limiting resources (i.e. water,
light, and nitrogen) are caused by both present
and historical fire, grazing, and climatic changes.
The project includes investigation of the effect
of fire on watersheds, comparative studies of
cattle and bison as the dominant grazers, and
the long-term effects of fire, grazing, climatic
variability, and agriculture on the annual carbon,
water, and energy budgets in tallgrass prairie.
National Radio Networking Research Test Bed — Building mobile networking devices and services requires integrating multiple disciplines including: electromagnetics, circuit design signal processing, network protocols, and service development. The emergence of multiple mobile communication devices is driving research and investment in new communications services and devices. The National Radio Networking Research Test Bed at the University of Kansas supports research and development of new radio devices, services, and architectures and provides a facility for the research community to test and evaluate their systems.
Small Business Innovation Research
— An NSF SBIR
award to Uncopiers, Inc. supports the development
of a prototype chemical-free, energy-efficient,
acoustic coaxing induced microactivation (ACIM)
based device designed to deink laser-xerographic
paper non-destructively one sheet at a time. Microactivation's
ability to concentrate an enormous amount of energy
on an extremely small point underlies ACIM's energy
efficiency. These controlled concentrations of
energy result in nearly spontaneous cleaning which
does not hurt the substrate leaving deinked paper
immaculately white and undamaged.
Advancing Mass Spectrometry For Peptide/Protein Sequencing — Under a CAREER award to Wichita State University mass spectrometry will be further developed and refined for identification of peptides and proteins, a crucial step in efforts to understand metabolic pathways, cellular signaling, and the biochemistry of disease. The sequence of amino acids ultimately identifies a peptide or protein. Before mass spectrometry can be used for high-throughput and high-accuracy sequencing directly a clear understanding of the rules that govern peptide and protein dissociation in the gas-phase is required. This project includes a comprehensive
investigation of factors that guide dissociation reactions, including the importance of cation choice, peptide sequence, tautomerization, cyclization, and intramolecular proton transfer.