$6.75M grant to benefit Rhode Island scientists
It was the result of a rare collaboration.
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
Now, the group spearheading the state’s first ever National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant is hoping that the federal windfall will help spur some more teamwork within Rhode Island’s research and science community.
The $6.75 million grant – awarded through the foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) initiative – will distribute money throughout the state’s higher education institutions in hopes of spurring development in life sciences.
Announced earlier this month, the grant requires a state match of $1.5 million. Gov. Donald L. Carcieri has included the appropriation in his fiscal 2007 budget, and Democratic leaders from the House and Senate have voiced support for the initiative.
The state received the federal grant through a joint submission by Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, something that both URI College of Environment and Life Sciences Dean Jeffrey R. Seemann and Brown Assistant Vice President for Research Pamela O’Neil said was rare.
But both are hoping the grant, which will be distributed over three years, will help all of the state’s research institutions improve their work and collaborate. And through that work, Seemann said, the state would be competitive for other forms of federal funding.
“That’s the underlying goal of this – to make strategic investments that make our existing faculty more competitive for federal grant dollars,” Seemann said.
The grant will be used to enhance several areas of the state’s research universities.
O’Neil said funding decisions were made based on which schools have strengths in what areas. All the facilities will be shared by the institutions.
The $2.25 million from the first round, for example, will go toward establishing shared facilities in marine life sciences and genomics at URI and proteomics at Brown – building on existing strengths at the universities.
“If we had to create either of these facilities from scratch, then the $6.75 million wouldn’t nearly be enough,” O’Neil said. “However, the EPSCoR is going to catalyze the resources we already have to make them really state-of-the-art facilities that can be used by all.”
While some of the money will be used to hire faculty and support graduate students, Seemann said a larger portion will pay for “a lot of very expensive high-technology instrumentation that the big, very successful research universities have.”
“If our faculty is going to be competitive in the life sciences, it needs that technology,” Seemann said.
While URI and Brown will receive major portions of the grant, Seemann said other higher education institutions will also benefit.
For example, Roger Williams University’s undergraduate marine biology program, which has a strong research component, will receive $400,000 from the grant. Seemann also said separate efforts are being made at other schools, such as the Community College of Rhode Island, which is becoming the undergraduate center for biotechnology training and work force development.
“It’s just as important for Rhode Island College or Roger Williams University … to be successful because they’re contributing something else that is the goal of EPSCoR – the growth of the pipeline of students that come through K-12, graduate from universities, then go out into the work force,” Seemann said.
Saul Kaplan, deputy director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, said collaboration between companies and universities is part of the state’s economic strategy.
Kaplan – who also heads the Business Innovation Factory, a group promoting public-private partnerships that has championed Rhode Island’s efforts to become the first border-to-border wireless state – said the goals of the grant tie into the EDC’s “Innovation @ Scale” initiative, which uses Rhode Island’s small size to encourage collaboration.
“We are far stronger when we combine our efforts than we are when we work as individual institutions,” Kaplan said. “That’s the power of our size and the real core of our Innovation @ Scale strategy.”
