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Vol. 36, No. 4 - April 2009
Office of Research Development and Administration
Editor: Joel Fritzler
CONTENTS
On the Bottom Line, Good Teaching Tops Good Research
—excerpted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mar. 13, 2009 (The full article can be read from an on-campus computer at: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i27/27a07201.htm. The author, Frank Heppner, is a professor of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island.)
In research universities, those faculty members who obtain grant proposals enjoy certain perks, including summer salaries and more travel. As one of my own professors pounded into my head years ago, "A great teacher is known all over the campus. A great researcher is known all over the world." The implications of that maxim are not lost on rookie faculty members as they consider promotions. In part, research is more prized because it is easy to determine the dollar value that professors bring to universities through outside grants. It is more difficult to establish the economic value of good teaching in such institutions. But it is not impossible.
When research universities hire faculty members in fields where grants are available, the expectation is clear. Several years ago, 65 percent of the ads in Science for science-faculty positions stated an expectation that the candidate would secure external support.
Large introductory courses therefore become orphans, sustained only by the good will of the transients who are their temporary custodians. To the successful researcher come fame and prestige. To the good teacher comes the gratitude of their students. But does that approach still make sense in light of the new economic realities at research universities? In 1969 Rhode Island provided more than 50 percent of operating expenses; this year it is below 15 percent. Our research-grant overhead income has increased, but our tuition income has increased much more. In 2008 grant recipients brought in about $60 million, of which roughly $20 million was gross overhead. But the research enterprise is expensive. A glance at our campus phone book reveals 38 names associated with grant administration.
During the same year, gross income from tuition was around $190 million. Clearly we are today a tuition-driven institution, and while research supported by outside sources provides valuable intangibles in terms of net income to the university, it's chump change.
So where does good teaching come in? The proportion of freshmen who return for their sophomore year, or retention rate, is 81 percent. That means, for our freshman class, about 500 students a year don't return. Because each student who did not return would have provided about $50,000 in tuition and fees over the three remaining years until graduation, that retention rate represents a loss of $25 million a year.
I teach 600 freshmen a year in my two intro-to-biology classes. It is a demanding pre-med-style course, and a number of years ago, the failure rate started to skyrocket, because the university had "broadened its concept of academic excellence" in admissions. I announced to my classes that those who failed the first exam would be required to come in and see me for a diagnostic interview. Because more than 100 students typically fail the first exam, I do nothing but see students for the next two weeks.
Of course, all the time I spend with these students I could be working on grant proposals. If, through this personal attention, I "salvage" five students, I will have recovered $250,000 in lost tuition. And I can do that every year. In my discipline, that is far more than I would ever be able to generate in grant overhead. Can faculty members be trained to be more effective teachers and so have an impact on retention? Absolutely. If research universities, facing hard economic times, are serious about improving their bottom lines, they need to improve teaching.
Research and Inventions Earn Big Bucks for American Universities
—excerpted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 6, 2009
At least 27 universities earned more than $10-million from licensing the rights to vaccines, drugs, medical devices, and other intellectual property in 2007, according to a new report by the Association of University Technology Managers. Ten universities earned more than $50-million each in license income in 2007. Almost 200 universities, hospitals, and research institutes responded to the annual survey, which started in 1991. From those institutions, 686 new products were introduced into the marketplace in the 2007 fiscal year, and 555 new start-up companies were established to take the technology to market.
Northwestern University nearly tripled its licensing revenue, to $85.3-million, after its blockbuster drug Lyrica was approved for use in the U.S. The drug is used to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain, and fibromyalgia. It is also prescribed outside the U.S. for general anxiety disorder.
Vaccine research helped put the University of Rochester in the survey's top 10 by licensing income. Rochester earned $53 million from its licenses.
New technology coming out of research universities represents more than income for higher education—it's one solution for a recession-battered economy. New products, which can spur new companies and new jobs, could be part of the long-term solution for economic recovery.
The report, "AUTM U.S. Licensing Activity Survey: FY07," is available at www.autm.net.
Amid the Gloom, Prepare for a Boom in Funding
—excerpted from Science, March 6, 2009
Your retirement account may be taking a beating, but if you have a grant application pending at a U.S. science agency, there's an upside to the global financial meltdown: Your chances of being funded have never been better. And if your application isn't already in the pipeline, don't despair. The competition for funds should be eased significantly next year. This improved research outlook comes partly from the $787 billion stimulus package signed by President Obama. It provides an additional $22.5 billion across several research agencies, including $10.4 billion for the NIH, $3 billion for the NSF, and $1.6 billion for the Dept. of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science.
The stimulus money is in addition to agencies' regular budgets, which were expected to be finalized this week as part of a $410 billion spending bill covering the rest of FY09. The version passed Feb. 25th by the House of Representatives contains a 20% boost for DOE's Office of Science, a major supporter of basic research across the physical sciences, and a 6.5% increase for NSF. NIH would receive a $937 million bump.
And that's not all. On February 26th, Obama delivered a 2010 budget request to Congress that would start to make good on his campaign promise to double the federal investment in basic research over the next 10 years. If Congress goes along, the $3.6 trillion proposal would boost NIH spending on cancer research by 21% during the fiscal year that begins on October 1st, raise NSF's budget by another 8.5%, to $7.04 billion, and give "similarly large increases" for DOE science and for research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
That trifecta of spending will mean tremendous opportunities for the U.S. research community. It puts NSF, DOE, and NIST back on the doubling track proposed in 2006. It's also welcome news for biomedical researchers, who have felt the squeeze from an NIH budget that has remained flat since 2004.
For research agencies, the immediate challenge is how to spend their unexpected wealth from the stimulus package. The Obama Administration has assured Congress and the public that these funds will go out the door as quickly as possible without lowering standards, and that their impact on the economy—in particular, on the number of jobs created—will be monitored closely. Although each agency is setting out its own guidelines for how to spend the money and what information grantees will need to provide, the rules drawn up by NSF and NIH appear typical.
Both agencies plan to dip into the existing pool of applicants for the bulk of the new awards. For NIH, that includes proposals that didn't make the merit review cutoff in 2008; for NSF, it means proposals submitted since last fall that seek funding in the current fiscal year. NIH will give top priority to its R01 grants, but most other categories are also eligible for stimulus money. Unlike at NSF, NIH is also preparing a solicitation for 2-year challenge grants, using up to $200 million from an $800 million pot given to the NIH director.
New Push to Unlock University-Based Research
—excerpted from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mar. 6, 2009
Paying for publishing? If you pay your taxes, some of the money goes for publication of scholarly research. That's part of the thinking behind the National Institutes of Health public-access policy, which requires that agency-financed research results be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. The policy, which went into effect in April 2008, came under assault last year when Rep. John Conyers introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which would have overturned it. Many publishers strongly supported the legislation; open-access advocates opposed it with equal fervor. The bill was shelved.
But this month Mr. Conyers reintroduced it, and both sides are gearing up for what promises to be a hot legislative battle this spring. Mr. Conyers may discover he is fighting a rear-guard action. Away from the high drama centered on Capitol Hill and the NIH, the concept of public access has been gaining traction at individual institutions and in calls to action from professional and scholarly groups.
Last month, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges put out a statement that urged universities to seize the day and becomes leaders in spreading research and scholarship. "This is the moment to take action," the statement said. Although academe has long counted on "formal publication systems"—monographs issued by university presses, for instance—to vet scholarly work and get it out there, digital technologies have now created new means of distributing scholarship. They have also made possible new forms of scholarly work—digital editions and archives, for instance, or multimedia projects—that may not be formally published but have high scholarly value.
All of that puts pressure on universities, deeply invested in scholarship, to step in. Not only do they need to help departments figure out how to evaluate new forms of work, they also need to recognize that "the efforts of researchers and scholars are wasted" if few people get to see the results. The statement also stresses the need for institutions to hold on to some rights to scholarly content to make sure it remains "as usable and broadly accessible as possible."
Researchers and research officers, interestingly, appear to be staking out some kind of middle ground between locking up information and giving it all away no matter what, the statement suggests.
At Boston University, the push for free and widespread access comes straight from the faculty, according to Wendy K. Mariner, professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights and chair of the Faculty Council, and Robert E. Hudson, the university librarian. Both are centrally involved with the university's newly announced open-access repository. Still in its fledgling stage, the repository is designed "to make things simple and move us into a 21st century of scholarship sharing," Ms. Mariner said in an interview. "This has been percolating for several years." Both Mariner and Hudson made it clear that many of the mechanics must be worked out—for instance, how to include data sets as well as journal articles.
For more information about these programs, contact Joel Fritzler, ORDA Information Specialist, at 453-4530 or jcfritz@siu.edu.
Applications are being accepted for grants from the Pre-College Psychology Grant Program, administered by the American Psychological Foundation. Grants of up to $20,000 each will support schools and organizations that encourage high-school students to study psychology and pursue careers in the field.
More information
Agency contact: Emily Leary (202-336-5843, eleary@apa.org)
DEADLINE: May 1
The Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) funds research on organic farming and food systems and the dissemination of these research results to the greater agricultural community. Proposals must involve farmers or ranchers in project design and implementation and take place on working organic farms or ranches whenever possible. Additionally, proposals should articulate how the proposed research project will foster the improvement or adoption of organic farming systems.
This request for proposals is open to any agricultural production, social, economic, or policy-related topic of concern to organic farmers and ranchers. OFRF supports research that is relevant to and takes place in certified organic systems. OFRF does not normally fund studies that compare conventional with organic systems as a primary objective.
Thanks to a partnership with industry, OFRF has special funding available for organic fruit research.
Additionally, OFRF has identified the following as areas of particular interest:
- Organic livestock systems
- Economic constraints and opportunities relevant to the viability of small- and medium-scale organic farms and ranches.
- Projects that investigate the interactions between components of organic systems and that take a systems-management (rather than an input-substitution) approach to solving production problems.
OFRF will not fund a project for more than $15,000 per year, except for fruit research grants, for which the maximum grant size is $20,000 per year. Matching funds from other sources or in-kind contributions from cooperators are encouraged but not required. OFRF will consider funding multi-year projects, but can only commit to funding one year of a multi-year project at a time. An exception may be made for fruit research projects, which are eligible for automatic extension over a period of years contingent upon availability of funds and submission of a satisfactory interim report for each year.
More information
Agency contact: Jane Sooby (831-426-6606, jane@ofrf.org)
DEADLINES: May 15; Nov 16
Letters of inquiry are being accepted regarding grants from the Gerber Foundation. Grants of up to $1 million each over three years will support research on pediatric health, pediatric nutrition, and the effects of environmental hazards on children from before birth to age 3.
More information
Agency contact: Catherine Obits (231-924-3175, cobits@ncresa.org)
DEADLINE: June 1
This initiative is designed to bring together a diverse interdisciplinary group with expertise in genetics/genomics, immunology, microbiology, and proteomics along with the more traditional areas of parturition research such as maternal fetal medicine, obstetrics, and pediatrics to address scientific issues related to preterm birth. Proposals must have an interdisciplinary approach and should address the biomedical causes and mechanisms underlying (preterm) parturition including but not limited to peri-implantational events, placentation, fetal determinants, fetal-maternal immune responses, biological basis for racial-ethnic disparities, mechanisms relating preterm birth to other adverse pregnancy outcomes, biology of normal labor, etc. Proposals seeking to identify biomarkers predicting preterm birth are welcome.
BWF anticipates making an initial 10 planning grants of which five full research grants will be awarded. The amount requested for the planning grant cannot exceed $50,000. Those receiving a planning grant are eligible to apply for a full research grant. Full research grants will provide up to $600,000 over a four-year period ($150,000 per year) and are expected to begin in 2011. The planning grant may be used for, but not limited to, travel for meetings between members of research groups, sample acquisition for later proposed studies, collection of pilot data, resources to support protocol generation, etc. Also, personnel costs, analysis costs, consumable supplies, animal studies, or human subject recruitment can be supported by the planning grant. Indirect costs and institutional overhead may not be charged against BWF grants.
More information
Agency contacts: Rolly Simpson (919) 991-5110, rsimpson@bwfund.org) or Debra Holmes (919-991-5134, dholmes@bwfund.org)
DEADLINE: June 1
The Institute for Research on Poverty invites applications from U.S.-based social science scholars from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to visit IRP, interact with its faculty in residence, and become acquainted with the staff and resources of the Institute. The intent of the program, which is supported by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is to enhance the research interests and resources available to visitors, to foster interaction between resident IRP affiliates and a diverse set of scholars, and to broaden the corps of poverty researchers. The scholars will be invited to give a seminar, to work on their own projects, and to confer with an IRP faculty mentor, who will arrange for interchange with other IRP affiliates.
Visits of one to two weeks' duration by three scholars can be supported during either fall or spring semester of the academic year 2009-2010. Transportation, lodging, and meal expenses will be covered by IRP.
More information
Agency contact: Robin Snell (rsnell@ssc.wisc.edu)
DEADLINE: June 30
The Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) collaborative groups competition offers awards to support teams of researchers who will advance fundamental understanding of decision making under uncertainty for climate change and related long-term environmental risks. The focus of these collaborative groups will be to generate fundamental new knowledge as well as information and tools that decision makers will find useful to help them incorporate climate change and related long-term environmental risks in their decision making.
The focus of these collaborative groups should be to provide new knowledge about how public officials, firms in the private sector, other groups, and/or individuals can incorporate existing knowledge about climate change and related long-term environmental risks into their decisions. In addition to generating societally useful information and tools, DMUU collaborative groups should enhance basic understanding within and across the social and behavioral sciences as well as related science and engineering disciplines.
It is estimated that five awards will be made from an anticipated funding amount of $5 million.
More information
Agency contacts: Rita Teutonico (703-292-7118, rteutoni@nsf.gov) or Robert O'Connor (703-292-7263, roconnor@nsf.gov)
DEADLINE: July 14
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) supports extramural research focused on understanding, controlling and preventing diseases caused by virtually all infectious agents. The NIAID has a long-standing interest in and commitment to global health and international research on infectious diseases. A solid foundation of international research and collaborations enhances the U.S. capacity for infectious disease research and the ability to respond to newly emergent disease threats. Moreover, the availability of NIAID-sponsored overseas study sites for field research advances our global public health agenda and allows for research that might not be possible in the U.S.
The International Collaborations in Infectious Disease Research (ICIDR) Program, initiated in 1980, makes awards to U.S. institutions to engage in substantial international collaboration with overseas institutions in tropical medicine and emerging infectious disease research. The goals of the ICIDR program are to support high-quality, collaborative research that will lead to or result in prevention, amelioration, and/or improved treatment of infectious diseases; increase relevant and collaborative research experience for both U.S. and foreign investigators; and facilitate and enhance scientific linkages between U.S. and foreign investigators to enhance the independent research capacity of the collaborating foreign institutions and foster further international collaborative research projects.
It is estimated that nine awards will be made from an anticipated funding amount of $6.3 million.
More information
Agency contact: Polly Sager (301-496-1884, ps31g@nih.gov)
DEADLINE: July 23
The Law and Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation supports social scientific studies of law and law-like systems of rules, institutions, processes, and behaviors. These can include, but are not limited to, research designed to enhance the scientific understanding of the impact of law; human behavior and interactions as these relate to law; the dynamics of legal decision making; and the nature, sources, and consequences of variations and changes in legal institutions. The primary consideration is that the research shows promise of advancing a scientific understanding of law and legal process. Within this framework, the program has an "open window" for diverse theoretical perspectives, methods and contexts for study. For example, research on social control, crime causation, violence, victimization, legal and social change, patterns of discretion, procedural justice, compliance and deterrence, and regulatory enforcement are among the many areas that have recently received program support. In addition to standard proposals, planning grant proposals, travel support requests to lay the foundation for research, and proposals for improving doctoral dissertation research are welcome.
More information
Agency contacts: Susan Haire (703-292-7266, shaire@nsf.gov) or William Leeman(703-292-4780, wemartin@nsf.gov)
DEADLINE: August 15
The Research to Aid Persons with Disabilities (RAPD) program supports research that will lead to the development of new technologies, devices, or software for persons with disabilities. Research may be supported that is directed to the characterization, restoration, and/or substitution of human functional ability or cognition, or to the interaction of persons with disabilities and their environment. Areas of particular recent interest are disability-related research in neuroscience/neuroengineering and rehabilitation robotics. Emphasis is placed on significant advancement of fundamental engineering and scientific knowledge and not on incremental improvements. Proposals should advance discovery or innovation beyond the frontiers of current knowledge in disability-related research.
It is expected that the projects will contain appropriate levels of quantitative engineering analysis. The duration of unsolicited awards is generally one to three years. The average annual award size for the program is $80,000. Small equipment proposals up to $100,000 will also be considered.
More information
Agency contact: Ted Conway (703-292-709, tconway@nsf.gov). Applicants are encouraged to contact a program director prior to submitting a proposal.
DEADLINE: September 15
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Note: Grant listings going back to FY2003 are available via this website's Reports and Publications section.
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