Four Auburn faculty members have been awarded grants totaling more than $600,000 through the Alabama Innovation Fund as part of Accelerate Alabama, the state’s long-term plan to prioritize economic development. Oladiran Fasina in the Department of Biosystems Engineering, and engineering faculty members Weikuan Yu in the Department of Computer Science and Software, Bruce Tatarchuk in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Marko Hakovirta, director of the Alabama Center for Paper and Bioresource Engineering, are among 15 first-round grant recipients chosen as part of Gov. Robert Bentley’s efforts to further prioritize innovation and entrepreneurship in the Education Trust Fund budget. The Alabama Innovation Fund includes the Renewal Program, which distributes grants to public universities based on each university’s federally financed research and development expenditures as reported over the preceding three years by the National Science Foundation, while the Research Program stimulates economic development.

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