UND researchers received more than $100 million in grants, contracts and other external funding during the 2007 fiscal year, surpassing the school's longtime goal, the school announced Monday.
The university's level of external research funding has risen about 40 percent in the past five years, said Gary Johnson, UND's acting vice president for research.
That growth will raise UND's national status as a research university and increase future research opportunities for faculty researchers, graduate students and undergraduates involved in research, he said.
"We've learned to become more competitive," Johnson said. "The research culture is catching hold on this campus, and we have a younger faculty, in particular, who have come here ingrained in research and are being successful in getting significant awards."
Focus on strengths
ADVERTISEMENT
UND President Charles Kupchella credited the increase in awards to focusing on UND's traditional research strengths, including energy and environmental research, engineering, aerospace and biomedical research, and to faculty members sending out more grant proposals.
For the past several years, UND has tracked the number of grant proposals the school's researchers send out each month and the number of grants awarded in that month, Kupchella said. With very few exceptions, he said, every month's numbers have been higher than the same month the year before.
"That shows our great dedication to the idea that we're going to have a level of sponsored research and sponsored programming to match some of the very best American doctoral research universities," he said.
UND took in about $89 million in grants and contracts funding during its 2007 fiscal year, which ended June 30. The remainder of the school's roughly $100.2 million in grants and contracts came from internally allocated research money, such as faculty research seed money and graduate student tuition waivers.
UND brought in about $96 million total in grants and contracts during the 2006 fiscal year, including internal funding, UND spokesman Peter Johnson said.
EERC leads
UND said its leaders in 2007 grants and contracts were the Energy and Environmental Research Center, which brought in about $37 million; the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, which brought in about $17 million; and the School of Aerospace Sciences, which brought in about $11 million.
It may be difficult for UND to grow much beyond the $100 million mark without hiring additional faculty, research director Gary Johnson said.
ADVERTISEMENT
"Our goal was to exceed $100 million in fiscal year '07, and we did that," he said. "Our plan is to continue with that, but at some point the question is, how much blood can you squeeze from a turnip in terms of asking faculty to continue pursuing and receiving research grants?"
Johnson said administrators are weighing options while discussing how much research money the school can bring in with its current number of faculty members.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other federal budget priorities also have made federal research money more competitive, Johnson said, which will make it more difficult to significantly raise UND's external funding.
