Recordpub.com - Research funds hit by economy Grant push keeps money at KSU; NEOUCOM receiving less

By Dave O'Brien
Record-Courier staff writer
When economic times are tough, higher education initiatives " including research " tend to take a backseat to more pressing matters.
Reviewing the research dollars received from some federal sources by two higher education institutions in Portage County over the past three to four years shows that economic conditions can have an effect on the amount of money university researchers receive.
The National Institutes of Health, the foremost federal agency supporting health and medical research, sent 1,762 grants and awards to universities and organizations in Ohio in 2007, totaling approximately $628 million. This was $1.5 million more than in 2006, but $88 million less than in 2005, according to numbers on the NIH Web site.
Kent State University received $4,171,594 from the NIH in 2007, $160,000 more than in 2006 and $1.5 million more than in 2005. And National Science Foundation awards to KSU have actually increased since 2004, when KSU received $2.1 million. The NSF awarded university researchers $3.5 million in 2005, $5.4 million in 2006 and $4.5 million in 2007, mostly for projects at the university's renowned Liquid Crystal Institute, earth sciences and science education, according to the foundation's Web site.
In 2007, the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy received $2,232,624 in NIH funds and $59,000 from the NSF, according to the federal agencies. In 2006 the NIH sent NEOUCOM approximately $2.5 million, a decrease of about $500,000 from 2005. The NSF sent $127,000 to NEOUCOM in 2006, none in 2005 and $127,000 in 2004, according to its Web site.
KSU researchers received funding for 514 grant proposals turned in during the 2007-08 academic year worth a total of $34.5 million, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Robert Frank announced recently.
Frank and KSU President Lester Lefton had asked faculty and adminstrators to submit more grant proposals to bring research money to the university. Faculty also were offered incentives of up to $500 if they submitted their proposals between Jan. 1 and June 30.
John West, KSU's vice president for research, was out of the country this past week and unavailable for comment, according to his office.
But for Walter Horton, vice president for research at NEOUCOM, there's "no question" that the economic times affect what research funds are received by public universities and medical schools.
The amount of available research funding "has declined precipitously over the last several years," Horton said. The NIH success rate for first-time grant submissions by principal investigators " the lead faculty or staff member or members on a project " was "about 30 percent."
That has declined, he said, to about 12 percent and "at some institutions, it's probably in single digits."
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, part of the private university, topped the list of NIH-funded medical schools in Ohio in 2005, the last year the available NIH numbers ranked U.S. and territorial medical schools by funding. That year, Case received 620 awards totaling more than $260 million to place 12th out of 123 schools.
NEOUCOM, in comparison, ranked 122 out of 123 schools with a dozen awards and fellowships totaling $3 million.
That doesn't mean NEOUCOM is bad at research. The school, Horton said, made the decision several years ago during its Research Visioning I program to focus on specific areas of excellence, based on evaluations of its programs by focus groups of staff and scientists both in the United States and abroad. Considering existing NIH and NSF funding, faculty strengths and resources, the areas of skeletal biology and auditory/neuroscience research were chosen as areas of focus.
"A Johns Hopkins or a Harvard may have multiple centers of excellence. We can't. We need to focus on two or three centers of excellence," Horton said. "Does that mean no other research is going on? Of course not."
Horton said he recognizes that NEOUCOM is still one of the smaller and more unique medical schools in the nation and said he doesn't believe the medical school needs to make excuses for that fact.
"We're very unusual in that we are a free-standing medical school. We are not embedded within a university structure, we do not have an on-site hospital and we don't get credit for the funding that goes to any of our affiliated hospitals," he said.
Decreased federal and other public funding for research has forced NEOUCOM to work harder on its focused research efforts, faculty recruitment and collaborations with its member and affiliated institutions, Horton said. The state recently recognized collaborative work by NEOUCOM and University of Akron researchers in the area of skeletal biology and biopolymers " plastics suitable for use in orthopedics and medicine " with $9 million in funds from the Ohio Resident Scholars program.
"What we have to realize is that the research mission of the institution is critical and interlinked with the education mission. That benefits regional, state and local health care and economic development. If you place (research) as a core mission, you have to find ways to continue to do that even in lean times," Horton said. "I think we're all in the same boat together. All public institutions are."