USC invests $10 million into research programs, hoping to help solve SC ‘problems’

The University of South Carolina will invest $10 million to create five research institutes over the next four years, which the school hopes will help it compete for federal research funding and solve problems facing the public in the state.

The five new institutes — the Institute for Rural Education, Institute for Extreme Semiconductor Chips, Institute for Infectious Disease Translational Research, Institute for Clean Water and Institute for Cardiovascular Disease Research — were announced on May 15.

The research done by these institutes will focus on issues affecting the state as well as fields with more national and international implications, according to a news release.

“This will spur innovation within the university that is going to provide opportunities to solve South Carolina problems,” Vice President for Research Julius Fridricksson said. “In addition to that, it’s also going to provide opportunities for our students to work on cutting-edge research as part of their education.”

The Institute for Rural Education and Development will focus on improving science, technology and math education in rural areas with the goal of improving the pipeline of S.C. students going to college in those fields, Fridricksson said.

The Institute for Cardiovascular Disease Research will study heart and kidney disease. This is especially important given South Carolina’s poor history of cardiovascular disease – heart disease was the leading cause of death in the state in 2021, according to federal data – and location within the “Stroke Belt,” he said.

The Institute for Clean Water is developing drones that can take water samples from across the state to be monitored for issues before they start causing health problems. That includes “Forever Chemicals,” known as Per- and Polyfluorinated Substances, according to Tammi Richardson, chair of the biological sciences department who will direct the clean water institutue.

The Institute for Extreme Semiconductor Chips will develop microchips to help bring more of the production of the technology to the U.S., as well as potential business investment to the state, Fridriksson said.

The Institute for Infectious Disease Translational Research will study emerging diseases that could become public health threats, he said.

“You can imagine that this is a topic that all of us are interested in,” he said. “We all want to know that when we have COVID 2.0 or whatever that looks like, (such as) the next pandemic, we want to be able to understand ahead of time how to deal with it.”

The institutes are expected to be competitive for – and eventually completely funded by – federal research grants, university spokesman Jeff Stensland said.

“It’s very important for us to be competitive for getting those research grants,” Fridriksson said. “So these five groups, each one of them we expect to be highly competitive in bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars to the university in the long run.”

The institutes will each be joint projects between faculty members from different colleges within the university, according to the release.

“One of the reasons why we’re doing this is because we want to foster interdisciplinary research,” Fridricksson said. “We know that a lot of the questions left unanswered in science have to do with people sort of coming together from different disciplines to try to solve them.”

The funding will also provide research experience for students through the institutes, including for theses and dissertations, Richardson said.

“It’s really an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary approach,” she said. “We’re attacking it from the science perspective and the social science perspective. I think it’s gonna be fun.”

The funding will be dispersed $500,000 annually to each of the five institutes over the next four years, according to a news release.

The Research Institutes Funding Program, which provided the $10 million that created the five institutes, was first announced in September 2022, according to the university’s website. The institutes will officially start operating in June, Stensland said. More institutes may be created at some point in the future, he said.