UA boosts effort to lure vital funds for research

Research is a half-billion-dollar annual enterprise at theUniversity of Arizona.

Last year, buoyed by stimulus spending and a federal budgetearmark or two, research grants, gifts and contracts brought innearly the combined revenue from tuition and direct tax dollars.

A big chunk of that money comes from the federal government - andas the president and Congress trim the deficit, universityresearchers brace for funding cuts, attacks on winning proposals andideological snipes at areas such as climate research.

President Obama said he wants continued investment in mostscientific areas, specifically clean energy. The budget herecommended Monday proposes increases in the biggest sources offederal research money - the National Institutes of Health, theNational Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, meanwhile,voted in January to roll back all discretionary spending to 2008levels. Its continuing resolution for this year proposes broad andspecific cuts in research funding.

It has invited people to visit an Internet site that takes aim atgrants by the National Science Foundation.

"We're really aware of the fact that nobody knows what thefunding agencies are going to have available to them, but everybodyknows it's not going to be good news," said Leslie Tolbert, UA vicepresident for research.

"It's going to be interesting, said Rick Myers of the ArizonaBoard of Regents, the governing board for the university system.

The regents recently challenged the universities to increasefunded research from $900 million to $2 billion annually by 2020.

About 60 to 65 percent of that money comes from the federalgovernment. If cuts come, Myers said, "we'll have to grow thenonfederal part of it."

The money doesn't go simply to equipment and salaries, saidMyers.

It pays interest and maintenance on buildings, supports facultyand graduate students, and involves undergraduates in significantpursuits, he said.

"If we didn't have research, we wouldn't have this higher qualityof instruction."

Climate researcher Jonathan Overpeck, co-director of the UA'sInstitute of the Environment, said research money "gives us a littleresilience in the face of the state budget cuts."

It is critical nationally, Overpeck said.

"We innovate better than other countries because of science. Ifwe start cutting these research dollars across the board, it's goingto be hobbling one of the biggest moneymakers we have in thiscountry."

A GOOD YEAR

Last year, it was all good news. In addition to a steady rise ingrants snared, the university benefited from money made availablefor stimulating the economy, getting $83 million in grants from theAmerican Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, known as ARRA.

The UA reported grants, awards and contracts from all sources atnearly $602 million for the year ending June 30, 2010.

By comparison, tuition and registration fees contributed anestimated $329.5 million, and the state gave $344.6 million.

Some of the grant money, which includes gifts, industry contractsand local government grants, will be spent in future years.

The UA spent nearly $490 million on research and development inthe year that ended June 30, 2010.

The stimulus funding created a bubble, Tolbert said, that won'tbe repeated.

Now, says one outside expert, universities nationwide face achasm.

"Any way you look at it, this is going to cost a lot ofscientists and would-be scientists a lot of jobs and opportunities,"said Jim Gentile, president of the Tucson-based Research Corporationfor Science Advancement.

PLAN FOR GROWTH

UA officials remain optimistic that they can sustain and evenramp up their award-winning ways in areas they have traditionallydominated, such as astronomy, space sciences and optical sciences.

They plan to compete even harder in medicine and biotechnology,where their share of money from the National Institutes of Health,the biggest source of federal research funds, has lagged, Tolbertsaid.

Engineering Dean Jeff Goldberg said researchers also need toconcentrate on funding sources that won't be cut. "Defense is goingto be strongly supported, so we need to be stronger in those sortsof things. We also need to be better in how we work with localindustry," Goldberg said.

The regents want the UA to focus on medicine and biotechnology,doubling grants in the next decade.

The UA also wants to build on investments made over the past fewyears in environmental and climate science, where it has created anew institute and is transforming Biosphere 2 into one bigscientific laboratory.

Joaquin Ruiz, dean of the College of Science, said the UA will becompetitive for whatever federal money is available, but he fearslosing momentum if cuts in federal and other government sourcescontinue.

He said his bigger concern is the impact of dwindling statesupport on the university's teaching mission and the impact ofrising tuition on would-be students.

Almost independent

The east end of campus is historically flush with grants andcontracts.

At the College of Optical Sciences, faculty are nearlyindependent of the vagaries of state budgeting. Their grants andcontracts from about 200 different sources brought in $29 millionlast year - 90 percent of the college's budget.

Junior faculty might be supported for up to two years, saidretiring Dean Jim Wyant, but after that they are expected to fullyfund their own salaries, buy their own equipment and employ theirown technicians and graduate students.

Federal grants are part of the mix, Wyant said, but much of thecollege's money comes from business partnerships and other sourcesof funding.

Still, there is some worry, especially in space sciences.

NASA and the astrophysical arm of the National Science Foundationare saddled with some large projects with big cost overruns. Thenext generation of big Earth-bound telescopes and space missions areall predicated on steadily rising budgets.

Still, an anticipated bad year could easily turn into a bannerone for the Lunar and Planetary Lab, which brought in $26.5 millionlast year. Director Mike Drake and his team are finalists for a NASA mission to a nearby asteroid worth $350 million.

Science can't expect to be shielded from economic woes, saidPeter Strittmatter, head of the Department of Astronomy and directorof Steward Observatory, which brought in $80 million in funding lastyear.

"A lot of people are unemployed. They've lost their their homes.Reductions in space funding and overall federal funding willcertainly have to be made," he said.

Strittmatter said Steward brings in $4 to $5 for every dollarspent by the state, and it comes from a variety of sources, but "asignificant fraction is federal money."

Steward has snared contracts for pieces of the largestastronomical projects around, he said. Marcia Rieke is building acamera for the James Webb Space Telescope, NIRCAM, which was therecipient of $10 million in stimulus funding last year. It is alsobuilding the $100 million optics package for the Giant MagellanTelescope and partnering with the Tucson-based Large Synoptic SurveyTelescope.

The UA is also positioned to be part of the president'sinvestment in clean energy, he said, with Roger Angel, the StewardMirror Lab's founder, now turning his attention to solar energy."That could be another big project," he said.

CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENT

Travis Huxman, director of Biosphere 2 and Flandrau ScienceCenter, said he and his colleagues in environmental science wouldlike to mimic the space side of campus.

He said Drake, the director of the Lunar and Planetary Lab,recently told him he needed proposals "with a lot more zeroes behindthem."

At Biosphere 2 and in the recently created Institute of theEnvironment, that challenge is being addressed with a focus oncampuswide proposals that address the overall effects of climatevariability, particularly in the Southwest.

The UA has a long history of climate research, Huxman said - aresponse to the fact that we live in a semi-arid region whereresources such as water and soil were critical to oursustainability, long before that term came into vogue.

"Most people focused on climate are focused on very practicalissues," Huxman said, "but in today's political climate it'sdifficult to not be ensnared in arguments.

Many of the cuts in current spending proposed by the Republicanmajority in the House of Representatives take aim at climate-changescience.

The administration, meanwhile, has made it a priority,particularly in spending for energy security proposals. The biggestgap in proposals by the president and Congress comes in theDepartment of Energy, which has been ramping up its funding of suchresearch under Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

The UA's largest stimulus grant - $13 million over five years -established an Energy Frontier Research Center, headquartered in theDepartment of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to pursue advances in thin-film solar photovoltaic energy.

MEDICINE

The push for more research funding by the regents falls"disproportionately on the UA's College of Medicine, said Myers.Last year's consolidation of the college with University MedicalCenter and its physician group creates an opportunity to build atrue medical research center, he said.

The big federal target is funding from the National Institutes ofHealth.

"NIH is the biggest funder," said Tolbert. "We are in the topechelon (of research universities) because space sciences andoptical sciences bring in money," she said. "We are nowhere nearwhere we should be in biomedical."

Tolbert said she'd like to see medicine, which brought in anoverall $152 million last year, emulate the Cancer Center, where asmall group of researchers brought in nearly $35 million.

The key, Tolbert said, is the kind of cross-disciplinary workexemplified by the scientists in the university's Bio5 Institute,where genomics and plant sciences have brought in continuingmultimillion dollar grants and the push is on for development oftherapies that will translate into businesses.

Said Tolbert, "We need to figure out where we are unique, what dowe do best and help our investigators think about places where wehave a particular advantage."

Contact reporter Tom Beal at 573-4158 or tbeal@azstarnet.com

GOP website seeks to identify waste

Republican leaders in Congress are enlisting the public to helpthem cut programs and identify waste.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor invites visitors to his"YouCut" website to vote for programs to be eliminated.

A link from there leads you to Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., whospecifically targets the National Science Foundation, and suppliesvisitors with a link to search NSF-funded proposals.

In a YouTube video, he singles out a couple of past proposals -$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the conduct of soccerplayers and $1.2 million to model the sound of things breaking.

The site suggests some search terms that might turn up otherwacky proposals - "success, culture, media, games, social norm,lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus ..."

Leslie Tolbert, the UA's vice president for research, wasn'tfamiliar with the website, but said the tactic is an old one.

"What they're doing generally is searching titles of grants,"said Tolbert. "It's such an easy and false way of judging thequality and potential impact of grants that it's very frustrating tous."

Federal agencies receive at least 10 times more proposals thanthey can fund, she said. "They have been through a vetting processlike few others. ... You don't get funded unless you make a prettystrong case right upfront that what you're doing is worthwhile."

Engineering Dean Jeff Goldberg said one way to avoid controversyit to carefully choose your words. "I've told my guys 'No catchytitles,'" he said.

- Tom Beal