2026 SPARK-ND Broadening Participation Program awards announced

ND EPSCoR and SPARK-ND invited multi-institutional teams to apply for planning or pilot grants of up to $30,000 to support the development of collaborative research proposals focused on broadening participation in STEM. The primary objective of this seed funding is to enable these collaborative teams to gather pilot data, design interventions, and establish partnerships that will lead directly to a competitive submission for a specified, larger federal grant (such as NSF or NIH).

The following two proposals have been awarded.

@TheTinyTitan: Tardigrades as Influencers for Soil Vitality and Performance

PI: Kata McCarville, Minot State University

@TheTinyTitan leverages tardigrades as a charismatic mascot for a regional soil monitoring project involving four diverse higher education institutions in central ND. By integrating best practices through public outreach “Soil Safaris” (Bioblitz-style events), K-12 teacher training, SPARK-ND-supported K-12 classroom activities, and cross-institutional undergraduate research, this 18-month project builds early-stage research infrastructure while broadening participation in STEM across Tribal and rural communities.

Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Snowmelt Flood Prediction in the Red River Basin

PI: Anjali Sandip, University of North Dakota

North Dakota's Red River of the North Basin is among the most flood-prone regions in the United States; the 1997 Grand Forks flood alone caused an estimated $4 billion in damage, and NOAA's National Weather Service North Central River Forecast Center has identified sparse snow and soil-moisture observations as a persistent barrier to accurate spring flood prediction. This project brings together a three-institution North Dakota team — UND, NDSU, and Minot State University — to adapt an existing physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework, originally developed for Himalayan glacier mass-balance estimation, to snowmelt-driven flood prediction in the Red River Basin, while launching a mentored

undergraduate research pipeline at Minot State.