Dr. Arne Bomblies
Vermont State EPSCoR Director
 
As we round the corner on the end of this calendar year, the VT EPSCoR team sends our best wishes for a productive finish to 2022 and continued successes in 2023. We are happy to share that several members of the VT EPSCoR team recently attended the National NSF EPSCoR Conference in Portland, ME. We continue to engage new partners through our Education, Outreach and Diversity efforts throughout the state with Vermont Works for Women, UVM Extension 4H programs and the newly formed UVM student chapter of SACNAS. Our private sector partnerships are also growing through new efforts with The Vermont Professionals of Color Network and the Vermont Women's Investors Network. Congratulations to Dr. Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Geography and Geosciences at the University of Vermont and the Vermont state climatologist, and a member of our BREE Climate Team who was recently appointed to serve on the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is the first Vermont-based scientist to receive this prestigious invitation. The sustainability of BREE research is strong as publications and follow-on funding from many of our faculty, graduate students and post-doctoral associates continue to emerge and contribute new knowledge to the important area of water quality in the Lake Champlain Basin. The Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) is a national consortium of science and services to provide actionable water resources intelligence to improve a national water model and flood forecasting with transformative support of up to $25 million over the next five years from the federal government has many of our BREE faculty, postdoctoral associates, graduate students and staff playing integral roles in this effort. As cited in a recent news announcement "The University of Vermont (UVM)-in collaboration with 28 universities and institutions-is poised to advance its status as a prominent institution in hydrological research". For more information about CIROH, please visit https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/uvm-contribute-national-effort-improve-water-management.