NSF's own award record confirms EduceLab's $14M NSF grant and shows cumulative obligated funding has since grown to $14.6M

nsfeducelabfundingbrent-sealesvirtual-unwrappingcorroboration

The National Science Foundation's own public Award Search record (award #2131940, "Mid-scale RI-1 (M1:IP): EduceLab: Infrastructure for Next-Generation Heritage Science") lists an "Estimated Total Award Amount" of $14,000,001 — matching the "$14 million" figure carried in claim-virtual-unwrapping-first-proved-on-2015-en-gedi-scroll, which had sourced the figure only to the University of Kentucky's own newsroom (UKNow). The NSF record independently corroborates the figure and its 2021 date from a government funding-agency primary fully independent of both UKNow and the Vesuvius Challenge. The record names an initial amendment date of 20 September 2021, a start date of 1 October 2021, William B. Seales as Principal Investigator, and the University of Kentucky Research Foundation as awardee.

The same record shows the grant has since been supplemented across five fiscal years: FY2021 $10,000,001; FY2022 $1,062,400; FY2023 $2,456,573; FY2024 $76,500; FY2025 $1,000,000 — a cumulative "Funds Obligated to Date" of $14,595,474 as of the record's last amendment (17 September 2025). The commonly cited "$14 million" figure is therefore the original 2021 award amount, not the cumulative total; the two now differ by roughly $595,000, a nuance the round figure doesn't capture but doesn't contradict either. Seales's EduceLab program went on to become the institutional root of HAVI's later, larger funding round — this note documents the earlier, smaller grant that built the lab HAVI's work now extends.