2021 Annual Research Report

The goal we strive for at South Dakota State University is to drive economic development through the expertise and inventions of faculty researchers at this land-grant institution.

As the state’s largest university, our research enterprise, which encompasses everything from agriculture and engineering to nursing and the humanities, impacts the lives and livelihoods of South Dakotans. In this issue, each researcher featured has received seed funding through the Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities Challenge Fund, but most have also secured larger national funding to support their research.

Assistant professor Anamika Prasad is the first mechanical engineering faculty member to receive the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award. She is using plants, such as sunflowers and soybeans, as inspiration to design next-generation composite materials.

In other NSF-funded research, assistant professor Yue Zhou, who received the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering Young Investigator Award, is determining how a new material helps increase the stability, as well as the storage capacity, of lithium-ion batteries. This basic science research will provide guidelines for using lithium metal to develop next-generation batteries to power electric cars and store renewable energy.

Assistant nursing professors Sarah Mollman and Brandon Varilek are adapting a supportive palliative care intervention, known as Project ENABLE, to meet the needs of cancer patients in west central South Dakota They are the first researchers to receive a Hillman Serious Illness and End-of-Life Emergent Innovation grant, along with the RSCA funding, to accomplish their goals.

Professor Hemachand Tummala secured a National Institutes of Health grant to do preclinical testing of a localized treatment to reduce colon inflammation. He has been working on developing formulations that unleash the anti-inflammatory power of curcumin—a component in turmeric, the yellow spice used in curry—for nearly a decade.

The final section of this publication focuses on the future. Now that the Raven Precision Agriculture Center has opened, we are building on that momentum to shape agriculture through the application of precision technologies to crop and livestock production as well as conservation practices. To that end, the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences has launched initiatives to refine precision ag data into decision-making tools for producers, to manage water and to ensure the security of that data.

Furthermore, by summer 2023, scientists from South Dakota State and the South Dakota Mines and Technology will work with industry partners to scale-up promising bioprocessing technologies at the POET Bioproducts Institute. The laboratory, which was made possible through $20 million in legislative funding and over $9 million in private funding, will help diversify the South Dakota economy by adding value to agricultural products and training the workforce to help industry partners expand their operations.