Polk State College has been awarded a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund one of its many initiatives related to STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — education.

The Arlington, Va.-based National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that funds nearly 20 percent of federally supported research conducted by colleges and universities. Each year, it awards nearly 10,000 grants to proposals that are deemed the most promising through a rigorous and competitive review process. NSF-funded researchers have won more than 190 Nobel prizes, and the list of NSF-supported advances include the Internet, Doppler radar, bar codes and artificial retinas.