Grown in Arkansas

Rice farmers around Stuttgart used to burn their hulls. In 1961 J.B. Hunt worked out how to sell them to Arkansas’s poultry companies as litter, and started a company in Stuttgart to do it. In 1969 the company bought five tractors and seven trailers as a sideline. The sideline is now J.B. Hunt Transport, headquartered in Lowell, one of the largest trucking and logistics companies in North America.⁠¹

In 1997 a power-electronics company was founded in Fayetteville and grew in the university’s research park with the help of University of Arkansas engineering graduates. Cree bought it in 2015. The buyer, now called Wolfspeed, reported in its 2026 annual report that the Fayetteville site still researches and builds power modules.⁠²

Arkansas research keeps that habit of working with what is close at hand. Its animal and plant science sits beside the state’s poultry houses and rice fields, and its power-electronics engineering beside a power-module plant.⁠³⁴

The next test lies in the steel mills of Mississippi County, which AEDC identifies as the country’s largest steel-producing county, and in the Smackover brines of South Arkansas, where proposed lithium projects would join an established brine-processing economy. A-State is building a steel-research center.⁠⁵⁶⁷ For both industries the question is how much of the knowledge, skilled work and supplier business they create can grow in Arkansas.

Arkansas raised about one pound in eight of the nation’s broilers in 2025, and food manufacturing supported about 52,000 private jobs, a share of the state’s workforce 3.5 times the national average.⁠¹² Companies in the industry paid for and performed $73 million of their own R&D in Arkansas in 2024.⁠³ The poultry companies, the University of Arkansas poultry center, USDA research units and UAPB’s aquaculture center sit close to production.⁠⁴⁵⁶

Arkansas institutions published 697 reviewed articles and reviews in food and animal science between 2021 and 2025. At least 243 name the UA System Division of Agriculture, its Agricultural Experiment Station, Cooperative Extension Service, a research and extension center or the Center of Excellence for Poultry Science.⁠⁷⁸⁹

USDA is the main federal sponsor. Its cumulative obligations to selected food and animal awards starting in FY2021-2025 reached $23.2 million. A further $35.9 million in formula capacity funds is one statewide pool that the Division shares across all of agriculture.⁠¹⁰

Industry ties are few and rest on individuals: several earlier co-authorship links depended on a single faculty member. From 2015 to 2025, three Arkansas companies won USDA small-business awards in food, poultry and aquaculture, $1.50 million in all. J M Malone & Son in Lonoke and Dunn’s Fish Farms in Brinkley used theirs for fish production, and Genecome Biotech in Jonesboro for a plant-produced protein against poultry diseases.⁠¹¹¹²

The plan pairs a multi-state aquaculture and poultry team bid with sponsored-research agreements at Arkansas food headquarters, and requires at least two active contacts per partnership.⁠¹³¹⁴ Each processor pilot starts from a one-page test brief fixing the product, assay and baseline, and measures the share of eligible tested batches that fail.⁠¹⁵¹⁶

Arkansas grew about 45% of the nation’s rice in 2025, and the Delta farms that grow it draw from an alluvial aquifer the state is pumping faster than its estimated sustainable rate.⁠¹² Research on that crop is concentrated in Fayetteville: of 777 crop researcher profiles in the October 2026 database extract, 550 are at UA Fayetteville, where the Division of Agriculture’s statewide staff are also filed.⁠³⁴

Arkansas institutions published 1,365 reviewed crop and water articles and reviews in 2021-2025, with strengths in weed science, insect-plant interactions and pest management. At least 330 name the Division, its Agricultural Experiment Station, Cooperative Extension Service or a research and extension center such as the Rice Research and Extension Center in Stuttgart.⁠⁵⁶⁷

Federal crop support has shifted toward USDA. Its competitive crop obligations more than doubled between awards starting in FY2016-2020 and those starting in FY2021-2025. Classified NSF crop awards fell from about $9.1 million in estimated award value to $1.6 million.⁠⁸⁹

USDA small-business awards went to four Arkansas firms working on hydroponics, PFAS treatment on farms, dicamba drift and insect monitoring: GSS Group, CatalyzeH2O, Celludot and SolaRid AR.⁠¹⁰ About 7% of Arkansas farms reported precision-agriculture practices in the 2022 Census of Agriculture, against 12% nationally.⁠¹¹

To rebuild NSF crop funding, the plan organizes an NSF plant-genome and organismal-biology proposal cohort and prepares multi-state successor bids before the current NASA and NSF team awards end in 2027-2028. It also launches a five-partner Delta aquifer team once the partners have chosen a groundwater monitoring site and baseline.⁠¹²¹³ On-farm irrigation trials measure water applied per unit of harvested output against an agreed comparison plot.⁠¹⁴

Trucking’s share of Arkansas private jobs was roughly 2.5 times the national share in 2025, and J.B. Hunt, ArcBest and Walmart run major freight and distribution networks from the state.⁠¹²³ The university research behind them is small. Arkansas institutions published 78 reviewed transportation articles and reviews in 2021-2025, mostly from a small group of faculty, and the October 2026 profile extract finds only two campuses with five or more engaged researchers.⁠⁴⁵

Federal grants support active work through 2029, led by AR-STRIDES and the DOT university transportation center. For selected awards starting in FY2021-2025, NSF records $8.64 million in estimated multi-year award totals and DOT $5.92 million in cumulative obligations, each on its own accounting basis.⁠⁶⁷ Bentonville’s Connect Dynamics, Inc. won a USDA small-business award to build a relay-trucking platform for small rural fleets.⁠⁸

Trucking employment fell about 6% between 2022 and 2025, and food and agricultural commodities made up about 22% of truck tonnage with an Arkansas origin or destination in the 2022 benchmark.⁠¹⁹ The plan targets cost and reliability, not expansion. A pilot to cut empty backhauls would track empty miles as a share of eligible miles across a defined fleet and route set, and check that deliveries stay on time.⁠¹¹⁰

To build a team large enough to carry the work past AR-STRIDES, which ends in June 2029, the plan combines a shared cluster hire of three to five faculty with a carrier data-sharing agreement and cross-campus work packages.⁠⁵¹¹¹²

Freight for the materials industries

Steel and lithium shippers need rail, road and river capacity. ARDOT’s account of the 2024 Lithium Summit describes infrastructure discussions and road-condition baseline work.⁠¹⁶ The freight team takes up their problems once it has an operator’s shipment records and a defined service question.

Walmart, ranked the world’s largest retailer by the National Retail Federation in 2026, is headquartered in Bentonville, and the trucking company J.B. Hunt in Lowell.⁠¹² Their daily problems, forecasting, inventory and routing, are the subject of operations research and information systems. Yet of 186 source-mapped Walmart papers from 2021–2025 with at most 50 authors, only eight list an Arkansas university affiliation.⁠³⁴⁵

Federal money has not filled the gap. NSF estimates $0.744 million in multi-year awards for selected FY2021–2025 starts in the field, almost all of it the first phase of Cultivate IQ, a farm-to-market data platform whose larger second phase is counted under food. USDA obligations are smaller still.⁠⁶⁷⁸

The firms that need this research are in Northwest Arkansas, but the publication record does not show which faculty and companies are ready to work together. The plan’s main action is a data and fellowship partnership with the headquarters firms: doctoral fellows co-funded by industry, paired with governed access to real operational data. The first conversation with a firm starts from a one-page brief. A university forecasting model is backtested against the firm’s own forecast on identical held-out items, locations and dates, with predictions locked in before outcomes are known. The test reports stockouts, lost sales hidden by stockouts, missing records and operating costs alongside forecast error before anyone agrees to a live ordering trial. No firm has yet agreed to a brief.⁠⁹¹⁰

Help suppliers meet industrial specifications

The steel and critical-minerals missions extend the same work to suppliers. For steel, researchers could trace scrap provenance against accepted product. For lithium, they could match qualified reagent, equipment and technical-service suppliers to a processor’s specifications. AEDC (the Arkansas Economic Development Commission) and regional colleges would help identify Arkansas firms able to compete, and a first project would count only supplier spending on work done in Arkansas. These proposals need the same governed data access as the retail work.

Electric vehicles, data centers and high-voltage grid connections all depend on power converters. Fayetteville has MUSiC, a national silicon-carbide research and fabrication facility, and a power-module site that Wolfspeed reported operating in 2026.⁠¹²

MUSiC’s NSF award ends in September 2027, so the near-term decision is its operating model: opening the fabrication lines and technician pathways to partner campuses, two-year colleges and industry. The people who could use them are concentrated, with 268 of 335 engaged researchers at UA Fayetteville. New technician training, such as UA-Pulaski Technical College’s NSF ATE Arkansas Grid Workforce Initiative, gives the pathway something to build on.⁠³⁴⁵

Federal support is substantial. For selected awards starting in FY2021–2025, DoD records $29.7 million in cumulative obligations and NSF $21.7 million in estimated multi-year award totals, on different accounting bases.⁠⁶

Grid work comes second. Employment in semiconductor-component and electrical-equipment manufacturing fell from 2022 to 2025 while industrial electricity sales rose about 21%. These are general industry trends; they neither isolate silicon-carbide devices nor show utility demand for grid research.⁠⁷⁸ MUSiC facility services and device testing therefore come first, and grid-integration work follows once the shared faculty cluster and test environment are in place.⁠⁹¹⁰ Before testing any device or package, partners agree on the reference design and the electrical, thermal or reliability specification, then track the share of valid tests that meet it, along with invalid runs and facility wait times.⁠¹¹

Test power questions with the materials industries

Steelmaking and lithium processing are prospective partners for industrial power research: furnace load and power quality on one side, motors, conversion equipment and monitoring on the other. The first step is a problem defined jointly with an operator and utility, using measured loads and agreed electrical limits.

More than four in ten Arkansans lived in rural communities in the 2020 Census, and the state’s clinical research sits in one city: 55% of all studies ever listing an Arkansas facility list Little Rock and no other Arkansas city. Site lists do not measure rural access.⁠¹²³

The researchers are in Little Rock too. UAMS holds 772 of the 1,133 health researchers in the October 2026 profile extract. The plan’s task is to take that expertise to rural clinics and regional campuses.⁠⁴⁵

NIH is the main federal sponsor: RePORTER records $71.1 million in parent-record fiscal-year awards in the population-health grouping during FY2021–2025. The NIH award domains the plan tracks are not a publication classification, so Figure 13 pairs each with its closest publication subfields.⁠⁶

Several multi-year awards anchor the work. The renewed UAMS Translational Research Institute hub of the federal Clinical and Translational Science Awards program runs through June 2031, and the statewide Arkansas INBRE network (IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence) supports research outside Little Rock. Three of the Little Rock COBRE (Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence) centers face award transitions in 2027–2028.⁠⁷⁴⁵

The plan pairs early-2027 continuity plans for the expiring center cores with outreach to UAPB, Arkansas State and UA Little Rock, and with rural delivery pilots designed with community providers. In a rural referral-access test, partners agree up front on the patient group, clinical service and follow-up window, then measure the share of referred patients who complete their visit. They record unknown outcomes and compare similar patients and clinics before claiming wider impact.⁠⁸

Mississippi County, which AEDC describes as the nation’s largest steel-producing county, is home to U.S. Steel’s Big River works and Nucor’s mills at Hickman and Blytheville. Under southern Arkansas, the Smackover brine is estimated by the USGS to hold 5.1–19.0 million metric tons of lithium in place. That is the lithium dissolved in the brine, not a measure of what can be recovered profitably.⁠¹²

The research base is much smaller. Arkansas institutions published 451 materials-engineering papers in 2021–2025, and only about 5% of them joined two Arkansas institutions.⁠³⁴

The plan’s role is to fill the gaps that companies and their technology vendors are not already covering: independent measurement, open process questions, access for smaller firms and skills that serve several operators. In 2027, partners pick one steel-testing bottleneck to work on, define the lithium process and supplier problems that public research can best address, and compare battery-materials options with a buyer at the table. Larger investments follow only when those tests justify them.

• 8,900

  private primary-metals manufacturing jobs in Arkansas in 2025⁵

• 10%

  employment growth in that industry from 2022 to 2025⁵

Primary-metals manufacturing is a growing industrial anchor.⁠⁶ Arkansas’s share of US company-funded R&D in primary metals in 2024 was about 10 times its share of all US company-funded R&D.⁠⁷

Steel: a testing bottleneck first

The mills make flat-rolled and structural steels.⁠⁸ A-State’s Center for Advanced Materials and Steel Manufacturing (CAMSM) is the natural home for that work. On 14 October 2026 the university announced a $2.1 million award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to CAMSM for computing and simulation equipment. Dedicated steel-research space is planned for the third phase of CREST, a center A-State is developing with ASU-Newport and Arkansas Northeastern College. The plan counts equipment as capacity once it is installed, staffed and open to outside users.⁠⁹¹⁰

The first project is faster testing: shorten the time from receiving a sample to delivering a report the buyer accepts, once the local method has been shown to match the buyer’s own. If that works, A-State can bring producers, fabricators and researchers together on harder questions, such as how scrap chemistry affects a steel grade or whether better prediction can cut rejected material. Partners choose the problem and agree on a baseline. The first public project should solve a problem shared by more than one firm, complement company laboratories and protect company process data.

The University of Arkansas’s full-scale steel-connection testing at CEREC could link mill research to structural performance, once access and the right test standard are agreed. Merrill’s announced fabrication and coating plant in Osceola adds downstream questions, though it does not yet show operating demand.⁠¹¹¹²

Lithium: from resource to a product buyers accept

The opportunity lies in the “missing middle”: removing impurities, concentrating the lithium, converting it into battery chemicals and qualifying the product with customers. The proposed South West Arkansas project is designed to take brine all the way to battery-quality lithium carbonate. On 28 September 2026 its developer said the final investment decision was still ahead, with commercial production targeted for 2029.⁠¹³¹⁴

In April 2026 Standard Lithium reported that its Arkansas demonstration plant had processed a million barrels of Smackover brine. Its joint venture, Smackover Lithium, has signed binding agreements to supply LG Energy Solution and Trafigura once commercial production begins. None of this gives universities use of the plant.⁠¹⁵

Public research takes up what that leaves open. The nearer-term work is independent testing of purification and conversion on representative brine, taken through to a buyer’s specification, and a supplier study of which services local firms could qualify to provide. The study starts from needs already identified by LiTHIUMWORKS, the Arkansas Lithium Technology Accelerator (ALTA), the Lithium Regional Innovation Cluster and the operators. ALTA, developed by the University of Arkansas, the Venture Center and Standard Lithium, is the existing channel to operators.⁠¹⁶¹⁷ South Arkansas’s bromine industry, which has worked with brine for more than half a century, may add handling experience.⁠¹⁸

The second piece is a battery-materials feasibility study with a buyer involved. It asks which precursor or cathode-material step could plausibly locate in Arkansas, and compares that with supplying manufacturers elsewhere while keeping testing and process services here.

Southern Arkansas University (SAU) has the LiTHIUMLEARNS program and ExxonMobil-sponsored direct-extraction research, and the University of Arkansas has membrane and separation laboratories. They are not yet a shared pilot line or a complete team.⁠¹⁹²⁰²¹

Other critical minerals join the portfolio where the evidence supports them. UA Little Rock’s vanadium cathode research with US Vanadium, and the company’s high-purity vanadium processing in Hot Springs, give Arkansas a foothold in refining and materials performance, though they do not show a new recoverable ore reserve.⁠²²

Gates and shared ground

Both missions can share access arrangements, data governance and analytical standards.

They compete through the capability-building route set out in Part V. The plan proposes A-State as convenor for steel, and SAU with University of Arkansas process researchers for lithium, working with AEDC on suppliers and markets; each convenor confirms its role before work starts.

Any field pilot sets out environmental monitoring and corrective actions suited to its scale, with freshwater withdrawal and consumption reported separately.

By June 2027, host institutions confirm which researchers and instruments are available and select a separate cross-campus materials project (Part IV lists the proposed leads).⁠²³

Steel is measured by faster buyer-accepted reports. Lithium is measured by end-to-end recovery with independently measured impurities, uptime, and water and reagent use. Both count Arkansas supplier contracts, repeat users of testing services and retained technical staff, against baselines agreed before each project launches.

Some awards continue past their end dates: NIH centers can apply for a next phase, as the pediatric center plans to, and NSF EPSCoR’s E-CORE and E-RISE awards can be renewed for up to four and three years.⁠¹ For each award, the host institution settles which services continue, who operates them and how they are funded while the award is still running.

The six major awards that support shared research capabilities across the state, described in Part I, end between 30 April 2027 and 31 January 2028. This plan takes effect by 31 May 2027, so it is in force for all but the first of those end dates. An interim action register tracks each host’s service plan and the Jurisdictional Steering Committee’s (JSC) decision against the deadlines below.⁠²

The state EPSCoR office prepares each continuity package with the host institutions, and the JSC makes the formal recommendation.

Other awards end in the same window but are not among the six: an NIH minority health research center on 30 June 2027, a multi-state biomanufacturing team award on 31 July 2027, and an industry-university electronics center on 31 August 2027.⁠⁶⁷ Four of the five NSF EPIIC capacity-building awards held by Arkansas institutions also end on 31 August 2027: the two at two-year colleges, NorthWest Arkansas Community College (2432716, CREATE) and North Arkansas College (2433180, ADAPT), and those at Arkansas Tech University (2433152) and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) (2433153, CAP-M2). Southern Arkansas University’s EPIIC award (2519896, SPARK) runs through 30 September 2028.⁠⁸⁹ The JSC decides at its first meeting whether to add these awards to the bridge schedule.

For every award on the bridge, the register records the decision, essential services, responsible operator, status of successor bids and confirmed funding. Twelve months later, hosts report which services remain open and any interruptions. A submitted grant proposal or a headline award total does not count as proof that a service will continue.⁠²

Starting steel and lithium

Steel and lithium planning runs on the same 2027 register, with its own decisions and funding. Arkansas State University’s steel-equipment award and Southern Arkansas University’s lithium activity are starting assets, not a permanent operating budget.⁠¹⁰¹¹ New discovery work does not draw on funds needed to sustain an expiring core, and a capital award is not counted a second time as money for people and services. The JSC decides on operators, funding and a bounded test in January 2028.

Many of Arkansas’s cross-campus research partnerships depend on a single researcher and could vanish when that person moves or retires.⁠¹² Shared capacity lasts longer. Any researcher at an Arkansas public university can run jobs on the state’s high-performance computing center in Fayetteville, mostly free of charge, which gives regional and undergraduate campuses a way into projects they could not equip alone.⁠³ The same idea runs through this chapter: analytical methods, specialized instruments and multi-campus teams shared across all seven growth areas.

AI/ML, data analytics and cybersecurity

TEConomy identified Data Science & Machine Learning Applications and Cyber-Physical Systems & Security as enabling capabilities across the entire portfolio, supporting predictive modeling, sensor networks, data provenance, privacy and secure operations.⁠⁴

Analytical methods already appear across Arkansas technical fields: a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) classification model flags AI-related methods in roughly 22–30% of utility patents granted to Arkansas inventors in 2015–2023, depending on the model threshold.⁠⁵ Business use is lower. In pooled Census business surveys from November 2025 to February 2026, about 12% of Arkansas employer businesses reported using AI in any business function, against 18% nationally. The two sources cover different populations.⁠⁶

Most Arkansas businesses not planning to use AI in the next six months said it did not apply to their work. About 22% cited privacy or security concerns, and as many cited not knowing what AI can do; respondents could give more than one reason.⁠¹ The plan helps employers test where analytics fits their operations and secure their data first, and ties new university AI faculty hires to verified project gaps instead of general hiring targets.

Computer-vision papers already come from several Arkansas campuses, and co-authorship records link computing groups with health researchers. Publication records miss smaller and proprietary collaborations and cannot show who has time to join a project, so each proposed team verifies its methods, data permissions and security controls before work starts.⁠⁹¹⁰¹¹

Materials and shared facilities

Materials Engineering Applications links steel, lithium and critical-minerals processing with power electronics and health. By June 2027, host campuses confirm who in the existing multi-campus materials and biomedical community is available, select a separate cross-area materials project, and confirm access to fabrication, characterization and biological facilities before any joint application.⁠¹⁰¹²

Past federal awards and campus facilities have supported applied materials work. A cellulose-nanocrystal patent cites Arkansas’s NSF EPSCoR ASSET III award, and a semiconductor patent assigned to the University of Arkansas trustees and Silicon Solar Solutions cites an NSF SBIR grant to the company. Neither is evidence of current licensing or commercial production.⁠¹³

A directory listing does not mean an outside researcher can use the instrument. Hosts of MUSiC, the NIH quantitative-proteomics resource, the high-performance computing center and ARA’s Core Facilities Exchange publish clear access terms and log completed external projects, repeat users, wait times and active users by institution type.⁠³¹² By March 2027, ARA and NSF confirm whether AR-NETWORK already has a facilities and infrastructure core.

People statewide

Research capacity across Arkansas depends on every tier of higher education. The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) anchors aquaculture and takes part across the new EPSCoR awards; regional universities contribute to agriculture, computing, materials and engineering; and Philander Smith, Arkansas Baptist and Shorter College are named outreach partners.⁠¹⁴

Two-year colleges build the technician pathways. Arkansas two-year colleges and the UA System have received 16 NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) awards since FY2016. In the 2024 federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) completions file, Arkansas two-year colleges awarded 19,450 sub-baccalaureate and associate credentials, including Health Professions and technical fields led by industrial maintenance, precision production and transportation. Black River Technical College, ASU-Newport and ASU-Beebe awarded the most technical credentials.⁠¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷ Degree counts alone do not prove unmet employer demand, so campuses and college partners review existing computing, engineering and technician programs before launching new courses or faculty hires.⁠¹

The plan’s team rule requires at least three institutions and two researchers at each. Headcount alone does not guarantee continuity, so teams also agree on shared work packages, name a second active contact at every campus and document handovers.⁠¹²¹²

The cross-area materials project selected in June 2027 is separate from any decision to authorize steel or lithium pilots. A full project for either must meet the team rule or receive an independently reviewed amendment, published before it is authorized. The plan does not assume either specialist team exists yet.

Specialist teams for steel and lithium

The first capability map for the two materials missions identifies available metallurgists and process engineers, analytical chemists, separation and corrosion researchers, reservoir and water specialists, controls engineers and technicians. It separates current staff, funded recruitment, outside partners and missing skills. Arkansas State University’s planned steel tools, Southern Arkansas University’s lithium work and University of Arkansas separation research are complementary starting points, and the map records their access and availability.⁠²⁰²¹²² Where a needed specialty is absent, a time-limited external research partner may serve better than an instrument without an operator.

Regional colleges help define paid work-based pathways with steel producers in the northeast and chemical processors in the south. Enrollment counts as an input; the outcomes measured are completion of an agreed technical task, employment and continued participation in Arkansas. New hires and facilities follow a validated gap and a funded operating plan. Each shared-service agreement names the operator, technician support, sample acceptance, charges, turnaround time and arrangements for smaller firms.

Six applications made the list, and they did not all get there the same way. The plan takes the seven growth areas TEConomy Partners identified for ARA as fixed, and tests which narrower research applications inside them are ready to deliver. Twenty-eight candidates, including subtopics, alternative field definitions and shared capabilities, faced four tests: research output (T1), major federal anchor grants (T2), provisional alignment with state economic sectors (T3), and how often peer EPSCoR plans headline the theme (T4).⁠¹²³

Passing any two tests admitted twelve candidates. Requiring at least two of those passes to rest on strong or moderate evidence left six.⁠⁴⁵ Food, crops, power and supply chain qualify under every single-test change examined. Freight drops out if federal anchors or economic alignment is removed; health drops out without federal anchors or if three passes are required.⁠⁶⁵⁷ Steel and lithium did not pass the screen and follow a separate route with a review before each stage, described below.

The Jurisdictional Steering Committee (JSC) adopts the selection rule in January 2027. An independent scorer outside ARA rescores every candidate against updated publication benchmarks in February 2027, and the JSC decides the application set in March 2027; the six are the working set until that vote.⁠⁸

What the screen can and cannot say

A crosswalk accounts for all 35 opportunities in the background strengths dossier, showing which were scored directly, grouped with a topic, or kept unscored.⁠⁹

A local company headquarters or an AEDC sector label does not show that an employer wants a specific research project, and a theme few peer plans headline gives Arkansas no competitive edge. A Tier A or B grade describes only how a candidate scored on the screen..⁠⁵

The federal-anchor test and the evidence-quality tie-breaker were added after early data had been seen. The plan therefore dates and freezes the rule before scoring, publishes the full sensitivity grid and logs every rule change. Dropping the peer-plan test leaves all six eligible, while dropping both T3 and T4 leaves only food, crops and health.⁠¹⁰⁸ Before the JSC funds any project, its proponents name the business or public-service partner whose problem it solves, document the team’s skills and the facility, material or data access the scope needs, assign responsibilities and define a measurable outcome. An operational pilot also needs the relevant plant-data or field-test agreements.

A competitive route for steel and lithium

A screen of past output finds established strengths; it cannot choose the next one to build. Neither steel nor critical minerals passed it, and Appendix A reports their cells, thresholds and sensitivity results unchanged. Both enter a separate capability-building route within the seven-area framework.

Before inviting proposals, the JSC publishes the route’s criteria, budget ceiling and independent review process, and opens the route to other emerging applications on the same terms. The JSC adopts the route in June 2027. An early discovery award requires documented industrial-customer or public-user need, relevant adjacent science, a specific capability gap, access to the material or data the limited scope needs, and a documented research increment beyond existing company, vendor, accelerator and publicly funded cluster work. Pilot authorization adds accessible samples or data, named technical staff and facility operators, a costed operating plan and partner contribution, agreed data and IP terms, a measurable technical milestone and a review-or-stop date. Each award delivers a public benefit such as a reusable nonconfidential method, fair shared-service access, supplier capability or a verified training pathway, and agreements protect trade secrets while preventing a single partner from controlling publicly supported access.

Discovery, pilot and expansion funding are separate decisions, and discovery funding alone leads to no building or permanent cluster hire. An independent technical and market review compares feasible proposals on incremental Arkansas public benefit, full lifecycle cost and likelihood of delivery, including the next-best use of scarce funding, such as sustaining an existing service, and recommends advance, revise or stop. The JSC publishes funded, reserve and deferred choices with reasons. A failed test can still inform a decision but does not justify continued spending without a new case.

The committee that submitted Arkansas’s 2024 plan had nine voting members, the Arkansas Research Alliance (ARA) and eight universities. Industry, two-year colleges and state agencies held no vote.⁠¹ Employers, rural communities and regional colleges that help carry out this plan need a vote in its decisions.

Committee membership

The plan proposes by-laws for the Jurisdictional Steering Committee (JSC), to be posted by 31 January 2027, that reserve at least one-third of voting seats for leaders outside academia. Two-year colleges hold at least two seats (or one through their state association), and every tier of higher education, from research universities to regional campuses and HBCUs, is represented, with a named alternate for each member. Principal investigators on active state EPSCoR awards serve without a vote.⁠³ The JSC publishes its roster, voting breakdown by sector and meeting minutes.

Conflicts of interest

ARA staffs the planning process and may also lead EPSCoR proposals, including the renewal of AR-NETWORK. Whenever a decision would fund, staff or select ARA, AR-NETWORK or an ARA-led bid, ARA may provide facts on request but does not write the recommendation or attend the vote. The rule covers the 2027–2028 bridge decisions and the formation of cross-campus teams, and the minutes record ARA’s absence.

Voting members recuse themselves only when a vote directly selects or funds their specific proposal or team, and their alternate votes on general matters. Institutions and companies seeking project funding disclose their interests and recuse from decisions on their own proposals. The JSC publishes the frozen selection rule and its date, the independent scorer’s name, the evidence workshop record and the adoption vote. If the JSC offers an opt-in service to help match researchers into proposal teams, it is voluntary and run by an independent operator outside ARA and any proposing institution.

Sponsors for steel and lithium

The JSC publishes capability-building criteria before problem scoping, which itself commits no funds, and adopts the route and its funding ceiling after consultation. Funded project selection requires conflict-of-interest and independent-review rules in force. AEDC is asked to validate the steel and lithium market cases with operators, downstream buyers and potential suppliers, while university hosts confirm technical leadership and operating capacity. Northeast and South Arkansas employers, regional colleges and affected communities inform the briefs. No role named here is a commitment until the organization accepts it. An independent reviewer assesses feasibility and the case for public investment.

Arkansas’s 2024 plan set five broad strategies without numeric targets, making it hard to tell what worked and what stalled.⁠¹ This plan keeps two ledgers: one for the statewide research environment and one for what the plan’s own projects deliver.

Two ledgers

The first ledger tracks the context the plan works in: verified institution-linked publications (24,743 papers in 2021–2025), agency-specific federal grant panels, academic R&D spending (HERD), business R&D ($719 million in the 2024 BERD survey), federal small-business awards under SBIR/STTR, including USDA awards, STEM employment, two-year and four-year credentials, and utility patents with Arkansas inventors or assignees.⁠²³ Patents are reported with inventor geography and assignee concentration so that volume is not mistaken for broad business adoption.⁠⁴⁵ These indicators show how Arkansas’s research economy is moving; they cannot show that an action in this plan caused the change. The patent extension notes and source-audit notes document the exact counting rules and boundaries behind each series.⁠⁶

The second ledger tracks the plan’s direct work: active partner agreements, completed field and plant tests, shared facility projects, supported grant submissions, and students completing technician or research steps. Every entry needs an owner who has accepted the role, a verified baseline, a due date, documented evidence and a decision point. Until a baseline is collected, the scorecard reports “not yet measured”, which counts as neither zero activity nor a completed milestone.⁠⁷

Before any application pilot begins, partners agree on one primary operating measure and fix its population, period, baseline, numerator, denominator, comparison group and missing-data rules before results are seen.⁠⁸ Seven area evidence cards and two one-page partner discussion briefs, for food processing and supply-chain forecasting, open the 2027 consultations; neither is a signed partner project.⁠⁹¹⁰

Steel and lithium measures

Each steel and lithium mission has one agreed primary endpoint, with supporting measures that guard against a misleading success claim.

Discovery and feasibility work are judged on a predeclared decision deliverable and need not claim a qualified commercial product. Every rate states its numerator and denominator. End-to-end lithium recovery is elemental lithium in final conforming product divided by elemental lithium entering the declared process boundary; extraction-stage capture is reported separately. Run and assay-validity rules are frozen before testing, and reports cover all initiated, completed, failed and assay-invalid runs. Valid-assay conformance appears beside the all-initiated-run result, and invalid assays stay out of the success numerator until resolved. Field pilots report departures from agreed environmental baselines and corrective actions, including reservoir and reinjection performance where relevant. Independent assays and customer documents separate a technically successful sample from a qualified commercial product. Project activity and wider industrial investment are reported separately, and no research award is credited with an entire plant or job announcement. The Jurisdictional Steering Committee (JSC) sets each mission’s specification, baseline and stop conditions in January 2028, when it decides whether the brief is ready for a bounded pilot. No supplier contract or operator role exists yet.

Targets and review

Where an indicator has a consistent historical series, the scorecard shows its recent trend and peer benchmark. For a new activity, such as a technician pathway or facility usage log, partners set a milestone and completion rule before launch, since there is no trend to extend. The JSC sets every target by 1 April 2027, with a responsible owner, a denominator, an interim check in 2029 and a 2032 endpoint.⁠⁷¹¹

Each spring, the annual review asks whether partners still need each application’s work, whether the team has the people and facilities to deliver it, and whether the agreed operating conditions are met. An application that falls short in two comparable reviews goes on watch unless the JSC publishes a specific reason to continue. Broad ARA growth areas are not dropped merely because a single grant expires or overlapping publication windows shift.⁠⁷¹²

How numbers are reported

Every number in the scorecard states who and what it covers. Member institutions review their records before each data freeze, and original figures remain visible alongside any restated series. Known data boundaries stay explicit: the legacy researcher-profile extract omits two-year colleges and files Division of Agriculture scientists under UA Fayetteville, while IPEDS credential data cover two-year institutions separately. Broad ARA growth areas, narrower delivery applications and subfield signals each keep their own definitions.⁠¹³¹⁴

No researcher is ranked or scored, and people are named only where a cited public source names them. Cell counts below five are suppressed, opt-outs are honored at build time, and any team-matching records remain internal, opt-in and independent of proposing organizations.⁠¹⁵

The annual cycle

The interim register opens in January 2027 to track the 2027–2028 bridge decisions and consultation milestones as they fall due. After the plan takes effect by 31 May 2027, the first full annual scorecard is proposed for 31 March 2028, with the JSC confirming the date by March 2027. The plan is then fully revised every two years, by 31 May 2029 and 31 May 2031, so that its priorities keep pace with the state’s economic development strategy. When a deadline is missed, the register records why and what decision comes next without waiting for the spring report.⁠⁷¹⁵