The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) has named the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation at the Georgia Institute of Technology the 2023 winner of its Public Impact Research Award. It is one of three announced by the APLU’s Council on Research (COR), which also included the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Research Award) and the University of New Hampshire (Research Safety and Accountability Award).

“Congratulations to this year’s COR Award winners,” Howard Gobstein, senior vice president for STEM Education and Research Policy and advisor to the president at APLU, said in a statement. “We’re delighted to recognize their leadership and outstanding work done in advancing public impact research, diversity and inclusion in university research, and enhancing safety.”

APLU, based in Washington, D.C., is a research, policy, and advocacy association of more than 250 research universities and land-grant institutions in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The Public Impact Research Award recognizes multi-project research efforts focused on community and public impact.

The Partnership, formed in 2020, is a regional public-private consortium tasked with leading strategic, statewide efforts to position Georgia as the leader for innovation, opportunity, and shared economic success.

APLU noted the Partnership’s work to foster collaborative projects across 34 institutes of higher learning, including historically Black colleges and universities. In 2023, the Partnership’s Student Engagement program brought 63 student interns from 25 universities across the country to work on 35 projects in 15 communities.

Other Partnership efforts have led to more than 45 multidisciplinary researchers focusing on community-driven needs such as increasing the use of data science at small and mid-sized farms across the state of Georgia to enhance production. Another project, in Valdosta, Georgia, led to improved emergency vehicle response times through the implementation of traffic signal preemption technology. Overall, the $2.36 million in funding awarded by the Partnership to support projects has garnered an additional $17.3 million in funding from other sources.

“We are honored to have been selected for this recognition,” said Debra Lam, the Partnership’s founding executive director. “Tackling the complex challenges our communities face requires novel approaches to how we innovate. By leveraging the unique strengths of the public and private sectors, our model at the Partnership proves we can have substantive impact that promotes geographic and community inclusion and supports economic mobility for overall shared economic success.”

The APLU award is the second such recognition received by Georgia Tech. In 2014, the APLU named Georgia Tech one of four recipients of its Innovation and Economic Prosperity Universities Awards. Georgia Tech was selected because of its efforts through its Enterprise Innovation Institute, the oldest and largest university-based economic development organization of its kind in the country.

“Improving the human condition through research, and more importantly, applying those research innovations to solving real-world challenges, has been our core focus since our founding in in 1885,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for Research. “The Partnership is the embodiment of that mission and our continued commitment to economic development in Georgia and beyond.”