The National Science Foundation's Geosciences Program (CFDA 47.050) awarded a $965,500 Project Grant to the University of Colorado to conduct the "In-Situ Collaborative Experiment for Collection of Hail in the Plains" (ICECHIP) field campaign. This 4-year research project aims to improve radar detection, monitoring, and forecasting of hailstorms and their impacts. The comprehensive field observations collected through ICECHIP, including mobile radars, unmanned aerial systems, atmospheric sensors, and high-resolution cameras, will provide critical ground-truth data to validate radar-based hail detection models and hail growth simulations. The research team, comprised of academic, government, private sector, and international partners, will leverage this novel dataset to address major gaps in hail science across 5 key themes, including hailstone behavior, storm-scale hail trajectories, environmental impacts on hail processes, hail surface characteristics and damage, and radar-based hail detection techniques. The project will also support the training of 32 undergraduate and 20 graduate students across 10 U.S. universities.