Research Impact
To further its impact on South Dakota, the region and world, the university has identified three strategic research themes where its strengths and expertise as a research university can make a real difference.
Bioproducts Innovation
Leveraging South Dakota's strengths to grow the state's economy
Agriculture is at the heart of South Dakota's economy. With millions of corn and soybean bushels produced each year, the state's farmers must find a variety of markets to sell their raw materials.
ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ is investing strategic resources into bioprocessing research to expand market opportunities for South Dakota's farmers.
Researchers from ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ's College of Natural Sciences, College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences, the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering, and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are leveraging their strengths and expertise to create a high-performing research innovation group aimed at developing value-added bioproducts.
This will address the global demand for novel bioproducts by utilizing research and development to create advanced biofuels, biofertilizers, bioplastics, biomass and other biomaterials. It will also strengthen South Dakota's innovation ecosystem by developing pathways for moving bench-scale discoveries into commercially viable products, fostering startup companies and spurring economic development.
What is bioprocessing?
Bioprocessing is the use of naturally occurring living organisms — like fungi, bacteria and plant cells — to create products. Scientists use biological processes, like fermentation, as a natural factory to convert agricultural products into value-added solutions.
How will this initiative support South Dakota?
- Create new markets for South Dakota's farmers.
- Support rural communities by keeping more of the value-added supply chain in state.
- Promote workforce development through the creation of more jobs.
- Expand South Dakota's economy into the growing biotechnology sector.
POET Bioproducts Center
In 2023, the officially opened its doors to the region's leading bioprocessing scientists. Strategically located in the Research Park at ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ, the center, managed by Dakota BioWorx, provides the structure and simplicity to scale-up innovative bioproducts and will be key in growing South Dakota's bioeconomy.
Rural Health and Well-Being
Bringing together researchers and community partners to address significant health issues for rural South Dakotans
Nearly half of all South Dakotans live in what is considered rural or frontier areas. These rural residents endure, on average, a great number of chronic illnesses, shorter life expectancies and other health disparities in comparison to their urban counterparts. A compounding list of factors, including geographic isolation and greater distance to health care facilities, specialty care and counseling services, as well less health insurance coverage, contribute greatly to these disparities. This results in rural South Dakotans paying more out-of-pocket costs for their health than urban residents.
ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ is addressing these rural health challenges by making strategic investments into a collaborative research group, designed to bring together researchers with community partners to find innovative solutions for South Dakotans.
Leadership from ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ's College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions, the College of Nursing, the College of Natural Sciences, the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering, and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences will guide researchers to form a rural health and well-being-focused research group.
The research group will facilitate projects that study the social, behavioral and ecological determinants of health disparities and will form community partnerships to develop rural health and well-being interventions.
Current and potential projects include:
- Alleviating the impact of mental health and substance use disorders in frontier populations.
- Translating and commercializing new treatments for metastatic cancers.
- Providing early palliative care to American Indian, rural and frontier residents living with advanced cancer.
- Addressing strategies to improve health among rural volunteer firefighters.
How will this initiative support South Dakota?
- Improve health outcomes for rural South Dakotans.
- Address the rural nursing crisis through education and training.
- Develop new treatments for cancer and other diseases through drug repurposing.
Agriculture Technology Innovation
Supporting South Dakota's farmers with data-driven decision-making tools
The global demand for food is increasing, and farmers are expected to boost their productivity to keep up with those needs. But in the U.S., overall farmland is actually declining. This means that farmers must increase their efficiency while also factoring in sustainability and environmental stewardship.
Key strategic investments are being made by ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ to solve agricultural challenges and help farmers grow their productivity and efficiency with real-time data and artificial intelligence-driven solutions.
Leadership from ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ's College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences will guide researchers from the College of Natural Sciences, the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as external experts, stakeholders and consultants, to form a precision agriculture-focused research innovation group.
The average farmer can generate roughly 500,000 data points every day. Technology, like satellites and ground sensors, have greatly contributed to the increase in available data for farmers. However, the lack of widely accessible and integrated technology to process this varied range of datasets and deliver actionable insights hinders the potential for scalable innovation in the ag sector. SDState's forward-thinking investments will enhance the state's research capacity and innovation, allowing for the development of leading-edge, data-driven, decision-making tools that will help farmers make timely, precise and sustainable decisions that enhance productivity and resource efficiency.
The research innovation group will focus on key areas, including precision agriculture, predictive modeling, automated farming technologies, smart irrigation systems, crop yield optimization, livestock management and geosystems engineering.
How can artificial intelligence help farmers?
Artificial intelligence is expanding into nearly every sector of society, and SDState researchers are focused on harnessing this emerging technology for public good. In the agriculture sector, AI models — like machine learning models — can be leveraged alongside thousands of data points produced each day to develop more accurate predictive models for crop production and protection, disease management and environmental challenges, like droughts and storms.
How will this initiative support South Dakota?
- Increase the productivity and profitability of South Dakota's agricultural sector.
- Train the next generation of scientists, engineers and agricultural professionals equipped with technical expertise in AI-driven solutions.
- Attract businesses and startups focused on agricultural technologies, creating new job opportunities and growing regional rural economies.
By 2027, food manufacturers will need to completely phase out synthetic dyes — like Red No. 3 and Red No. 4 — from their foods. These food manufacturers may look towards the innovative biotechnologies being developed by researchers in the Department of Biology and Microbiology. Ananda Nanjundaswamy is extracting carotenoids (a class of molecules that are responsible for the naturally occurring pigments in plants and animals) from microbes grown in bioreactors. These molecules can then be mixed into different foods to give them rich colors.
Monitoring crops currently requires around 5,000 reporters from across the U.S. who fill out weekly surveys based on the visual observations of fields in their area of the country. Based on standard definitions, reporters estimate the progress of crops through their stages of development while also providing subjective evaluations of crop conditions. Farmers rely on these reports, which are currently the best field-based crop progress information available at the regional to state level and are distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers across the United States will be able to monitor their crops in real time, thanks to a novel algorithm from researchers in ÈÕ±¾avÊÓƵ's Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence. By fusing 30-meter spatial observations from the polar orbiting satellites of Landsat, Sentinel-2 and temporal observations from the geostationary satellite, the research team was able to calculate high spatial and high temporal crop greenness development for operational near-real-time crop monitoring.
The university's annual research magazine is published in the spring by University Marketing and Communications.
