After taking steps to streamline administrative support for research and to secure additional grants, the University has seen a 37 percent increase in sponsored research this fiscal year. Some departments still continue to fight for scarce funds, even though others have seen their awards double.
Brown received $179.7 million in research grants for the fiscal year that ended in June, said Clyde Briant, vice president for research. Of these, Brown secured approximately $27 million from funds made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the economic stimulus package signed into law by President Obama.
Although the one-time boost from stimulus funds contributed to the overall increase, other funding avenues rose 16 percent from levels consistent over the past few years, Briant said.
"It's a really positive statement about the faculty and their interest in sponsored funding and the good job that they do to attract it," he added.
Streamlining
Recent structural changes to the Office of the Vice President for Research contributed to the growth in funds by encouraging grant proposals, Briant said. Last February, the Organizational Review Committee — a task force working to cut $14 million from this year's budget — outlined recommendations to, among other things, facilitate the grant proposal process.
The recommendations included using the Office of Sponsored Projects to help with grant contracts and subcontracts and creating a consolidated center that would provide administrative support in areas such as grant proposals, according to an ORC report released last February.
But the University opted not to provide research support through a consolidated administrative center and reorganized Briant's office instead.
As a result, "a number of backlogs in the office have gone away," Briant said. "For example, we have overseen all of the subcontracts that are associated with our awards, and we feel that that's going extremely smoothly now. But in general, I think it's just the overall processing has flowed out in a very nice sequence."
Alert and active
In addition to administrative reorganization, the University has been taking steps to encourage faculty members to write more grant proposals.
"One of the main things I do is to try to be aware of opportunities and then to try to get that information all to faculty," Briant said. One recent strategy has been to have program officers from the National Institutes of Health talk to Brown faculty about the NIH's funding areas and what funders might look for in grant proposals.
Two years ago, the University also hired Lewis-Burke Associates, a government relations organization, to alert faculty of funding opportunities, Briant said.
Although the amount of funding has increased, the University has not seen a large change in the percentage of funds coming from different agencies, Briant said, adding that the NIH provides the largest portion of Brown's federal funding sources, followed by the National Science Foundation. The University also attracts funding from several private organizations and foundations, including General Motors, Pfizer, IBM, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, according to the University research profile published last month.
Reeling it in?
When the economic stimulus package was signed into law two years ago, researchers were unsure if its effects would last. Some worried the stimulus would give out enough grants to set a higher standard that would be difficult to reach when the stimulus funding ended, said Mark Bertness, professor of biology and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Another concern was that increased competition for grants would discourage young researchers and drive them out of the field, according to a March 2008 report, co-sponsored by the University, called "A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk."
Now, Bertness said, researchers across campus have differing opinions about the effects of the stimulus, depending on their department.
Bertness added his division, which is largely NSF-funded, has seen its funding nearly triple over the last four years. Faculty in his division have seen their funding double.
"We're really pretty optimistic about funding," Bertness said. "We have lots of students that go on to graduate school and want to be researchers, and certainly I've never — well, never say never — but I don't hear students deciding not to go into ecology and evolutionary biology because they're not going to get funding. You go into it because you love it."
On the other hand, Barry Connors, professor of medical science and chair of the neuroscience department, said "everyone's getting squeezed" in his field. His department is largely funded by the NIH, whose budgets "haven't gone up very much and haven't tipped with inflation," he said.
Because the increase in funding was largely tied to the stimulus bill, there likely will not be a long-term increase in grant funds, Connors said.
Things have changed greatly since Connors was a student, he said. Now, progressing from a student to an independent research position is "a long haul" made more difficult by the shortage of funds.
"Not only do you need money to run a laboratory and do science, but you need money to train people," Connors said. "The graduate programs here at Brown — and really anywhere in the state — are heavily dependent on funds from the federal government."
Juggling jobs
Faculty members have had to spend more time writing grant proposals in recent years, Connors said. The number of awards has gone down, and funding has become increasingly competitive. Faculty have started writing more grant proposals, after initial attempts are rejected.
As a result, it's harder to "actually do some science," Connors said.
"I think all of us would rather do research than write proposals about doing research," he said.
Bertness said he has not noticed a difference in time spent writing grant proposals, though he added that the case might be different for different departments.
"There's certainly a perception by some that it has changed, that this has become an onerous burden for junior faculty members in departments like cell and molecular biology, where almost all of them are NIH-funded," he said.
But Briant said writing grant applications is really the "first stage of research."
"You're looking at the literature, you're looking at what's known, you're sort of mentally testing your hypothesis that you want to propose," Briant said. "So to say that the proposal is somehow completely separated from the research is not the right way to think about it."
