2nd Year of IMPACT Award Initiative Continues Bolstering Innovation

Campus Colleagues,

During the September Board of Trustees meetings, I was able to speak on the incredible work that UK’s faculty community conducts that helps advance both our institution and Kentucky. I am continually grateful to work alongside a faculty body that does so much in service to our community, and I am proud to offer my support to those endeavors where possible. 

Part of that support has come through the IMPACT (Institutional Multidisciplinary Paradigm to Accelerate Collaboration and Transformation) Award initiative, launched a year ago with our eight Program Year 1 awardees. 

The initiative was designed to emphasize and bolster the transdisciplinary and innovative projects that you conduct on our campus, helping to inspire greater ingenuity in our community. Through the IMPACT initiative, the inaugural cohort of IMPACT Award recipients are working to address the current and future challenges that Kentucky faces. I want to thank the Program Year 1 awardees for their tireless work to advance our state.

I am equally excited for our Program Year 2 awardees — together, they are helping transform what research and innovation at the University of Kentucky look like. Their projects are bridging various fields and areas of expertise through transdisciplinary collaboration. In the spirit of teamwork and collaboration, we are holding the IMPACT Awards Reception, where Program Year 1 teams will be able to present their work and discuss challenges, opportunities and successes they have encountered during the first phases of their projects. The Program Year 2 teams can use this knowledge to guide their own approaches to their work. 

By coming together to share knowledge and collective experiences, the IMPACT Award recipients will leverage their combined expertise to strengthen their own projects. In that same vein, UK must come together as one community to confront the challenges that Kentucky and our communities face — by pooling our considerable resources and working collaboratively, we can do more and achieve more than we could alone. 

Our second cohort of IMPACT Award recipients will each be featured in a UKNow article this spring semester that will detail more of their innovative projects. 

Please join me in congratulating each of our IMPACT award recipients for their accomplishments. I am excited to see the impact their projects make on our UK community.

Thank you for bolstering our efforts to inspire ingenuity at UK and beyond. 

Robert S. DiPaola, M.D. 
Provost