Description
The West Virginia EPSCoR Office is responsible for development, administration, management, and implementation of the state's experimental research improvement program. The mission: to build "research competitiveness" within institutions, individual researchers, research teams, and collaborations between institutions throughout the state. Research competitiveness is achieved when faculty obtain peer recognition in their field and gain direct entry into mainstream research funding. WVEPSCoR accomplishes this mission by supporting new or existing faculty positions, equipment, laboratories and research ideas for limited periods of time. The WVEPSCoR Office administers other grant and education programs in conjunction with the primary Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) award from the National Science Foundation and provides proposal development assistance to researchers. The Office is also responsible for financial and programmatic reporting, outreach, infrastructure proposals, policy development and support to the state research advisory council.

Focus
University-based Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields of research. All mainstream and interdisciplinary science programs recognized by NSF are eligible to participate in EPSCoR. Agency-specific EPSCoR Programs target areas of interest such as DoE EPSCoR (energy), NIH IDeA (biomedical), NASA EPSCoR (aerospace), etc. At the state level, research focus areas must be consistent with the identified focus areas of the State of West Virginia's Strategic Plan, Vision 2015. The WVEPSCoR Office coordinates all EPSCoR and EPSCoR-like programs in the state.

Oversight
The WVEPSCoR State Advisory Council was established by Executive Order 5-03 signed by West Virginia Governor Bob Wise on March 4, 2003. The Council advises the Program Director on various management issues and assists in the direction, policies, and procedures for program implementation. Eleven members from government, industry and academics make up the current advisory council.

Location
The State WVEPSCoR Office is housed within the Higher Education Policy Commission, located at 1018 Kanawha Boulevard East in Charleston, WV. Support is provided by the WV Department of Education and the Arts and the Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC); HEPC is also the fiscal agent for receipt of federal funding.