The University of Missouri-Kansas City has received a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Program to study and mitigate alcohol and drug abuse using AI and Secure Networked Sensing.

It is one of the first times a Missouri institution has been awarded a graduate education grant from the NSF. 

"This is a fantastic project, not only for the research team and graduate-level students involved, but also for the university as a whole, which will receive national attention for this groundbreaking work," said Chris Liu, Ph.D., vice chancellor of research and dean of the School of Graduate Studies.

The research team will be led by Farid Nait-Abdesselam, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Science and Engineering, and includes Masud Chowdhury, Ph.D., Mostafizur Rahman, Ph.D., Dianxiang Xu, Ph.D., Yugyung Lee, Ph.D., Ahmed Hassan, Ph.D., and Yusuf Uddin, Ph.D., all professors at the School of Science and Engineering. The team will also include Ye Wang, Ph.D., Ryan Copus, Ph.D., Arif Ahmed, Ph.D., George Gotto IV, Ph.D., Martha B. McCabe, Arnold Abels, Ph.D., Brent Never, Ph.D., and Alexis Petri, Ph.D.

The project will hire and support 20 Ph.D./MS students and impacts over 100 additional graduate students. Students will come from several different programs across campus.

"Students involved in this research will be exposed to so many faculty members from different disciplines. Interdisciplinary study is extremely critical to our students in today's graduate education," Liu said. "This project is not only an opportunity to learn, but to expose students to a real-world research project to address crucial societal issues."

The research is slated to last at least five years and begin in July.

The NSF is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering. Yearly, the agency gives out roughly 12,000 new grants.