Rice receives $100 million in grants

By Catherine Bratic     9/11/08 7:00pm

Rice received a record $100 million in external funding for research and education last year, which will allow the university to fund cutting-edge research and facilitate the creation of many new programs. Most of this funding will go toward the sciences and engineering disciplines. "This increase shows that Rice is really moving in the positive direction, and I think the future trend will be great," Vice Provost for Research Jim Coleman said. "The increase means that the faculty and staff were incredibly productive in securing funding to do the research teaching and outreach which they think is important."

Provost Eugene Levy said this funding is one of the principal means in which Rice can support faculty and graduate research and education.

"If you walk into any building on campus that has research going on, these funds are doing that work," Levy said. "It's crucial to the mission of the university."

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Levy said the $100 million mark is significant as a concrete means to measure the research success of a university.

"When people think about universities, they tend to think above and below $100 million as a boundary between the larger, more successful universities and the smaller ones," Levy said. "It's an important measure of the university's prominence and distinction as a research institution."

Coleman said the vast majority of the funding was directed toward the schools of science and engineering because their research is expensive. However, this funding also provided grants for the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, the School of Humanities, the School of Social Sciences and the School of Architecture.

Funding for the humanities and social sciences so far includes $78,071 for "Identifying the Biological Influences on Political Temperament" by the department of cognitive science; $117,895 for "Collaborative Research on How Nominators Affect Government Formation" by the department of political science; $167,370 for "Government Policy Responsiveness in Multiparty Parliamentary Democracies" by the department of political science; and $150,608 for the "Pama-Nyungan Reconstruction and the Prehistory of Australia" by the department of linguistics.

Some of the science research funded by the grants includes work by the physics department in low-temperature physics, the bioengineering department's research on advanced methods of cancer detection and an ocean-drilling program investigating the earth's climate history being conducted by the earth science department.

One of the programs established through a $7.2 million grant from the Houston Endowment last January was the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program. The program is aimed at educating a new generation of school principals.

"Because of the nature of the K-12 educational world today, it calls for a different type of training or educational development," REEP Director Panya Yarber said. "Today, principals have to lead instruction; they have to hire and fire teachers and staff; they feed kids; they're responsible for transportation, handling the budget and relationships with parents and community members. Those areas fit the expertise of a business school."

REEP is the first school leader program to develop and train principals within a school of business, Yarber said.

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