Montana Track-2 Awards 2016

On August 22, 2016 NSF EPSCoR announced Track-2 awards. Designed to build multi-jurisdictional collaborations, these awards cover two priorities: Research into fundamental questions about the brain and Research at the nexus of food, energy and water. Montana was awarded to work on 2 Track-2 projects.

The first is a $6M research project led by Montana State University's Benjamin Poulter (PI) and Paul Stoy (co-PI): Sustainable socio-economic, ecological, and technological scenarios for achieving global climate stabilization through negative CO2 emission policies

This project establishes a coalition to examine the consequences of an economy based on bioenergy and "carbon capture and sequestration" (the process of capturing waste carbon dioxide from power plants and at other sites so the greenhouse gas is kept out of the atmosphere) in the Upper Missouri River Basin. The team, which includes researchers from Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, seeks to identify a framework of carbon mitigation strategies that would minimize conflicts with food security and clean energy production priorities.

Montana State University's Charles Gray is a co-PI on Neural Basis of Attention led by Dartmouth University.

Focused attention is critical to countless daily tasks, from operating machinery to maintaining safety in high security settings. This project forms a consortium of neuroscientists in New Hampshire, Montana, Rhode Island and Nevada to develop a greater understanding of attention. The goal of this project is to develop a unified model of attention that applies across multiple domains, from single cells to large brain circuits. The consortium expects to establish lasting collaborations, build industrial partnerships, expand the neuroscience workforce, and extend educational opportunities to traditionally disadvantaged groups.