The Innovation Partnerships Grant (IPG) program strengthens connections between university members and ORAU collaborators by emphasizing research and education themes that align closely with ORAU’s expertise and strategic priorities. Grant applications focus on targeted workshops or conferences that showcase the university’s key STEM research and education growth areas, while fostering collaborative opportunities with other member universities to enhance value. ORAU is particularly interested in supporting events that contribute to advancing thought leadership on developing a national strategy for STEM education and workforce capacity building.
Examples of 2025 ORAU’s Innovation Partnership Grants include:
IPG recipient: Purdue University
Workshop attendees touring the Purdue Envision Center and Data Center that provide the XR/AR and high performance computing and storage capabilities for Purdue and the nation's researchers.
Purdue University hosted the “Cyberinfrastructure-enabled Sustainability Research and Education” event March 24-25, 2025, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, with funding awarded through the Innovation Partnerships Grant Program.
The goals of the event were to connect faculty from other ORAU member institutions with approaches to sustainability education at Purdue University, establish a schedule for follow up in-person trainings at the member institutions where Purdue staff and faculty will conduct trainings in using cyberinfrastructure (CI) for climate science and introduce CI resources at Purdue including the High-Performance Computing supercomputers, visualization and extended reality (XR) capabilities, and faculty and staff working on sustainability for future collaboration.
As a result of the event, participants gained a better understanding of the Minority Service Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) led workshops and upcoming training and student internship opportunities at member institutions. The Minority Serving – Cyberinfrastructure Consortium is a growing community of information technology (IT) professionals, campus leaders, faculty members, researchers, and students from across the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges and universities (TCUs).
They also gained a first-hand understanding of the interdisciplinary research happening at Purdue on the 17 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Participants from Minority Serving Institutions gained understanding of the CI and collaboration resources available to faculty and mid-career researchers at a doctoral degree-granting institution like Purdue.
Attendees included Debanjana Das (Howard University), Uttam Ghosh (Meharry Medical College), Milanika Turner (Clark Atlanta University), Alexia Jones (MS-CC), Venkatesh Merwade (Purdue University), Iman Haqiqi (Purdue University) and Jibin Joseph (Purdue University).
IPG recipient: Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIU) hosted “Large Language Models (LLM) Nexus: Bridging Technical Innovation and Ethical Horizons” at SIU on May 14, 2025, with funding awarded through the Innovation Partnerships Grant Program.
The overarching objective of the event was to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the current capabilities, future directions, and societal implications of LLM. The goal was to empower participants with a deeper understanding of emerging research trends in multimodal and secure LLMs, real-world applications of LLMs in healthcare, transportation, cybersecurity and privacy compliance, and hands-on experience through workshops that allowed participants to interact directly with LLMs and Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
The outcome of the event was a success, with 116 participants from diverse backgrounds, including undergraduate and graduate students, early-career researchers, faculty members and professionals in attendance. There were six expert talks that covered interdisciplinary topics, including distributed AI, federated learning in healthcare, poisoning defense using LLMs, privacy policy automation and secure AI in public safety.
Participants reported significantly increased awareness of both technical opportunities and security/ethical considerations associated with LLMs. There have been multiple follow-up collaboration requests between speakers and student attendees, including early discussions on joint grant proposals and research visits.
Learn more about ORAU’s Innovation Partnership Grant program.