National Science Foundation

It was a day that residents in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore metropolitan areas won’t soon forget: March 26, 2024, when the Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed, killing six and leaving many more forever impacted. Since then, George Mason University professors Elise Miller-Hooks, Alireza Ermagun, and Shanjiang Zhu have received two NSF RAPID grants to study the cause and impact of the collapse, and potential preventative methods for the future.

Kirin Emlet Furst, in Mason's Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, is using funds from an NSF CAREER award to measure the amounts of harmful "forever" chemicals in drinking water.

Mason scientists and partners will leverage their climate expertise and the university’s resources into broader societal implications, thanks to a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The National Science Foundation's Navigating the New Arctic researchers traveled to a remote location to attend the Permafrost and Infrastructure Symposium in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, some 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Using virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI), a team of researchers at George Mason University is taking a wrecking ball to barriers faced by neurodiverse individuals in construction.

The National Science Foundation (NSF)’s I-Corps program is an accelerator that helps entrepreneurs and researchers work together “to bring invention to impact.” Mason serves as an official I-Corps site, supporting local grantees through the exploratory stages of venture-building, as well as preparing them to apply for the national-level program.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the National Science Foundation has awarded more than 800 Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grants designed to get researchers into the field and lab quicker than the traditional grant process.

The Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the planet, but for a team of researchers at George Mason University that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the changes to come.

New trade routes in the Arctic mean unprecedented traffic and industrialization are likely to follow, so George Mason University’s Elise Miller-Hooks and her team of scientists will be taking a closer look at what that will mean for the region’s infrastructure and governance thanks to a $3 million National Science Foundation grant for a project called “An Expanding Global Maritime Network, Its Arctic Impacts and Reverberations.”