KINGSTON – The University of Rhode Island received more than $85.5 million in research grants and contracts during the 2009 fiscal year, the highest amount in its history and an increase of almost $20 million from the year before, the school said today.
“This year wasn’t just a fluke; we also set a record for grants awarded in any two consecutive years,” Peter Alfonso, vice president for research and economic development at URI, said in a statement.
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More than half the grants were won by the Graduate School of Oceanography ($28.7 million) and the College of the Environment and Life Sciences ($22.2 million). A significant share was also won by the College of Arts and Sciences ($11 million) and the College of Pharmacy ($7.2 million).
Just under three-fourths of the grants were awarded by the federal government, particularly the National Institutes of Health, with the rest coming from the state, nonprofit foundations and the private sector.
Notable grant recipients included Zahir Shaikh, a professor of pharmacy, who received funding to expand the state’s biomedical research network; Jimmy Oxley, a chemistry professor, who received money for the Center for Excellence in Explosive Detection; and Dr. Anne S. De Groot, a molecular biology professor and director of the new Institute for Immunology and Informatics, who just last week won a $13 million grant from the NIH.
“We’re incredibly proud of the success we have had in attracting funding to the university,” Alfonso said. “It’s a great reflection on our faculty, both younger faculty who have matured and are winning big awards and our senior faculty who continue to produce good work.”
URI researchers also submitted a total of 744 grant proposals, seeking a combined $414 million in funding, during the 2009 fiscal year, which was also a record, the school said.
Since it takes roughly six months to hear back on a grant proposal, the school said it expects this year’s grant total to set another record. Former URI president Robert L. Carothers, who retired in June, had said he hoped the school could win $100 million in grants annually by 2010.
“We are focused on being a fully-engaged research university, and we have a target of receiving $100 million in annual research funding and expenditures,” Alfono said. “We are a making great progress toward that goal.”
Alfonso attributed part of the increase to a new emphasis on supporting grant-writing efforts through the school’s Research Office and efforts in partnership with the General Assembly and the R.I. Board of Governors for Higher Education to “that make it easier and faster for faculty to purchase equipment and establish research laboratories paid for by grant funds.”
In 2007, the General Assembly passed the University of Rhode Island Research Act, which created the URI Research Foundation to take over management of the school’s intellectual property from the URI Foundation, which had been responsible for doing so since 1982.
Alfonso emphasized the grant money’s impact on the Rhode Island economy. “That $85.5 million is money that the state would not have had this year without the research enterprise at URI,” he said. “And the total economic impact of those grants is probably twice that, when you consider the equipment and supplies purchased, the people we hire and the things they buy, and the taxes that will be paid.”
