AL EPSCoR is a consortium of the 8 AL Ph.D. granting institutions, the AL Department of Commerce (DoC), the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, and numerous business leaders with the goal of increasing sustained national S&T research competitiveness in AL. Overall, AL EPSCoR has been awarded 265 federal EPSCoR grants totaling $167M from 2009-2019, or an average of approximately $17M of EPSCoR funding per year. These federal EPSCoR grants have led to new scientific discoveries, capabilities, and high-tech infrastructure in AL leading to important sustainable job growth.
The ALEPSCoR state-funded Graduate Research Scholars Program (GRSP), designed to increase the pool of highly trained graduates available to AL industries, provides funding for graduate students performing high-tech federal EPSCoR Research, with funding leading to 204 Ph.D. and 67 MS degrees.
In 2016, ALEPSCoR developed Alabama’s first S&T Plan / Roadmap formally adopted by the State of AL. Later Roadmap updates were incorporated in the AL DoC Economic Development Plan, Accelerate Alabama 2.0. These Roadmap research capabilities are incorporated into a searchable web database, which identifies where specific types of high tech research, along with a highly trained workforce, is available in AL to support current and emerging business enterprises across the state.