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Research spending at Montana State University slowed slightly in the past year to $106.9 million, yet, at the same time, MSU scientists kicked their grant searches into high gear, putting the Bozeman campus in a strong position for next year.
MSU released on Friday its annual report on research, which showed total spending for the fiscal year ending June 30 was down $2.7 million from the $109.6 million total the year before.
“As competition for federal dollars has increased, MSU’s faculty have really risen to the occasion,” Renee Reijo Pera, MSU vice president for research, said in a press release. “They are writing more grant proposals and winning these very competitive awards. I am very optimistic about the coming year.”
Research is important to MSU for prestige and pride, to the state’s economy for creating spinoff companies and jobs, to students for giving them hands-on experience and scholarships, and to Montana for solving the state’s problems in such areas as health, crop pests, transportation, engineering, energy and the environment.
MSU stressed that research benefited students by providing $9.2 million in teaching and research assistant jobs and scholarships. For the second year in a row, three undergraduates won prestigious national Goldwater Scholarships.
MSU is one of 108 American universities labeled as having “very high research” activity by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The Bozeman faculty expressed alarm two years ago that MSU’s hard-won status might be in jeopardy.
Thanks to efforts by Reijo Pera and the faculty’s hard work, “it appears things are on the upswing,” said Tracy Ellig, MSU spokesman. “Faculty have done an incredible job writing grants.”
MSU scientists received 540 new grants in the past year, the second highest number in campus history, surpassed only by the years of federal stimulus spending. The new grants represent a 21 percent increase over the previous year, and the amount of money in them is up 26 percent. Scientists won’t start spending those funds until the 2016 fiscal year, so those dollars won’t show up until next summer’s annual report.
As Congress’s budget sequester tightened federal research spending in recent years, grant dollars fell here and at universities around the nation. Last summer MSU started adding agricultural research to its total research spending report, which beefed up its bottom line.
In the fiscal year that just ended, out of MSU’s total $106.9 million in research spending, $89.3 million came from federal grants, gifts and other sources, while $17.5 million came from state and federal funding for agricultural research through the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station.
In 2014, MSU spent $90.5 million from federal grants, gifts and similar sources, before agricultural research was added in. MSU’s research spending peaked in 2012 at $112.3 million.
Biomedical and health research were the biggest areas of MSU research in the past year, thanks to grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
The NIH awarded MSU a $5.4 million grant last October to research infectious diseases and those that spread between animals and humans, work led by MSU scientist Mark Quinn. That grant supports research on influenza, antibiotic resistance staph infections and the cattle disease Q fever.
MSU also won a $10.7 million NIH grant to fund its Center for Health Equity Research, which will look for new ways to improve health care for rural Montanans.
Other Bozeman scientists are investigating rural transportation safety, working with local laser optics companies, assisting with the Air Force on new satellites, and working with a team of universities based at Mississippi State on drones.
On Tuesday Gov. Steve Bullock will visit Bozeman to celebrate the first awards from the state’s new $15 million research grants program, passed by the 2015 Legislature. MSU scientists submitted 150 ideas to compete for those funds, and six MSU proposals were finalists.
That shows MSU faculty members are “very enthusiastic and actively engaged and eager participants” in pursuing research, Ellig said. “They rose to the occasion and all of us are incredibly grateful to them.”
Originally published by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.