NSF Award
2305618
This Regional Innovation Engines Development Award is focused on alleviating food insecurities and associated health disparities in the 41-county target service region that incorporates significant portions of central and southern Mississippi. The region includes some of the country's most demographically diverse and economically challenged counties. Twenty-five of the region’s counties are characterized by persistent poverty, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In partnership with the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), Jackson State University (JSU) will lead the development of the Sustainable Innovation Ecosystem (SIE) Food Industry ecosystem to unlock talents of the community programmatically, establish convergent food industry clusters, and align nodes of innovation to inspire, grow and launch new emerging technologies and businesses by creating a sustainable cycle of innovation. The resources, expertise, and experience of JSU and USM, combined with their regional industry and economic development partners, are well-positioned to build an innovation ecosystem to align research and innovation to address gaps in three interrelated areas of interest: 1) Agriculture and food access; 2) Advanced technology and climate resilience for small-and mid-sized farms; and 3) Agricultural supply chain.<br/> <br/>The vision of this NSF Engine Development Award is to develop an innovative ecosystem that: improves health and nutrition, reduces poverty, creates a diverse talent pool of skilled technical workers, and improves economic diversity and resilience across the targeted service region. Use-inspired research and development will address and be guided by the five dimensions of access to nutritious food: affordability, availability, accessibility, accommodation, and acceptability. The goals will be centered around improving the resilience and health outcomes of all Mississippians by preparing stakeholders to assess, manage, and mitigate the complex and devastating realities of generational poverty and persistent food insecurity. The award can create new jobs that advance economic equity within the region by focusing on creating high-quality job opportunities, strategic workforce investment and training, small-business creation, and regional clustering of target firms. This NSF Engine Development award will enable the project to develop and enhance the Leadership Team and its multi-sectoral partnerships with local and regional constituents and organizations throughout the region, supporting the development of concrete plans for translational research activities, rural engagement, intervention plans, and recruitment efforts around STEM workforce development with quantitative metrics for success, and an analysis of needs from each stakeholder and a plan to address them in preparation for an NSF Engine project.<br/><br/>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.
