RIO-NM Funded Awards


As part of the RIO-NM project to support research capacity, NM EPSCoR is making awards to institutions across the state. The awards listed below span three categories of funding, Seed Awards, SURE Awards, and Workshop Awards.


Title Award Type PI Organization Amount Start Date
Additive Manufacturing of Bioinspired Bone Scaffolds for Digitally Enabled Rural Orthopedic Support and STEM Workforce Development in New Mexico Seed Sungjin Kim UNM $50,000
Establishing New Mexico Tech’s First AI-Humanoid Robotics Research Testbed through Undergraduate Capstone Teams and Graduate Research Mentors SURE Ali Barenji NMT $15,385
From Prompt to Silicon CURE: An Undergraduate Experience in End-to-End Integrated Circuit Design SURE Mario Renteria Pinon NMSU $16,500
Research in AI-Enabled Autonomous Materials Laboratories for New Mexico’s Future Workforce SURE Manish Jain NMT $16,465
Shallow Subsurface Characterization of the Permian Basin Using Dense Seismic Nodal Array Seed Urbi Basu NMT $49,884
Tiny Vision–Language Models (VLMs) for Automated Archaeological Artifact Interpretation Seed Sarbagya Ratna Shakya ENMU $49,929
Large Language Models for Code and Compiler Education: A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience SURE Huixin Zhan NMT $16,286
The Fungus Among Us: Cultivating and Sequencing Fungi from Diverse Environments: Undergraduate Research That Connects Mycelium to Students and Our World SURE Michael Remke NMHU $16,500
Utilizing Conservation of the Rio Grande River Cooter (Pseudemys gorzugi) as a Comprehensive Undergraduate Experience in Conservation Biology SURE Corey Green ENMU $16,475
Mapping Economic Development in New Mexico Through Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Remote Sensing and AI Seed Jiakai Zhang NMT $50,000