Faculty seek federal research funds

By Jocelyn Wright     10/1/09 7:00pm

The endowment may be down, but funding for sponsored projects keeps going up. The proposal activity for sponsored research projects over the past two months is up 60 percent from two years ago, and a little under 200 more research proposals were submitted in Fiscal Year 2009 than in FY 2008, Research Provost James Coleman said. In total, Rice received $93.5 million for sponsored projects in FY 2009. Federal stimulus money accounted for a large proportion of the new funding, particularly under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Coleman said.

"There are just more opportunities because of the stimulus act," Coleman said. "Everybody knows budgets are tight and for faculty who really want to grow research or educational activities, they recognize they need to get external funding to do that."

He added that the increase in young faculty at Rice might also be a factor.

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"Young faculty trying to build their research careers are generally more active in proposal-writing than the people they replaced," Coleman said.

The Vision for the Second Century calls for increasing the research stature of the university, and the BioScience Research Collaborative, which opened this fall, has accounted for a large uptick in the amount of research funding received, Director of Sponsored Research Sarah White said.

"We are already seeing collaborations happening out of that which wouldn't happen otherwise," White said.

White said the Office of Research has been laying the foundations to encourage more research proposals over the past few years. Two years ago, Coleman met with the heads of the schools and departments to find out what his office could do to better support them. He said his office has since been working to make the research proposal process more efficient, and is currently working on hiring a proposal development specialist.

"The more we can allow the faculty to focus on the intellectual part of research programs and less on the administrative, the more efficient Rice will be," Coleman said.

Sponsored projects in the School of Engineering hit record levels last year, and the School of Social Sciences followed suit, breaking every record it had ever had for sponsored projects, Coleman said. Although his office has yet to analyze the number of proposals in sciences compared to humanities, Coleman said he had the sense that the numbers were up across the board.

The amount of funding received for science research projects tends to greatly surpass the amount for humanities and account for 80 to 90 percent of overall sponsored project funding, but Coleman said this was because research in the sciences tended to be much more expensive.

"Different kinds of research cost different amounts of money to do," Coleman said. "Most of the really expensive research is in science and engineering, so we have larger amounts of money there, but that doesn't mean we don't have a lot of wonderful research in fields that don't cost so much money."

White said that although Rice's research portfolio was several hundred million dollars lower than that of its peer institutions, this was a difficult comparison to make because Rice did not have the professional schools - such as engineering or medical schools - that bring in large amounts of money. She added that many of the institutions ranked similarly to Rice had more faculty, which meant that they could more easily submit a greater number of proposals.

"If you were to compare Rice to Emory University, for example, Emory has a medical school and about 80 percent of the funding that comes in comes from the medical school in terms of sponsored research," White said. "It's very hard to get apples-to-apples comparisons."

Coleman said funding for sponsored projects was not beneficial just to faculty, as it also affects undergraduates by giving them more research projects to work on and paying for equipment for their training.

"We're enhancing the intellectual environment at Rice," Coleman said. "It's one of the reasons we care so much about research.

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