Schyler Nunziata is a first-year Ph.D. student in biology at the University of Kentucky, and she's just one of the young scientists that can testify to the impact of Kentucky's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, known as Kentucky EPSCoR. Nunziata, who works in David Weisrock's lab that combines genetics, genomics and evolutionary biology, received two grants from the National Science Foundation through EPSCoR. The first $5,000 grant, while she was a masters student at Eastern Kentucky University, funded her entire thesis project which involved collecting two lined salamanders, developing genetic markers, and genotyping the salamanders. The second grant, as a Ph.D. student at the University of Kentucky, allowed her to prepare a pilot study. Nunziata says, "EPSCoR helps get students into research, helps develop them as scientists. For me, it allowed me to delve deeper into a field that I was interested in and find out what research was like and what a career in research would entail. EPSCoR has had a huge impact on my career path."

Visit the Weisrock Lab website - sweb.uky.edu/~dweis2/The_Weisrock_Lab/Front_Page.html

Kentucky EPSCoR has been the channel for over $430 million in research funding to the Commonwealth's academic institutions. Over 80 percent of this funding has been competitively won from federal research programs. In addition to supporting 1,400 research jobs and providing research training for over 2,300 students, this funding has created 21 research centers and major research initiatives on Kentucky's campuses. For more, visit kyepscor.org and kynsfepscor.org.

This story first appeared on UKNow, the University of Kentucky's official news source. Visit uky.edu/UKNow. A direct link to this story is uknow.uky.edu/content/kentucky-nsf-epscor-success-stories-featured-video-series .

The UK videos were produced by REVEAL (research.uky.edu/reveal), a site that offers multimedia with the stories behind the leading-edge research under way in colleges across the University of Kentucky campus.