Utah State sets personal record for research funding
Utah State University secured record-high research funding for the second year in a row, and some administrators expect that is happening for a third time this fiscal year.
Almost 40 percent of the university’s revenues come from research — a sum of over $232 million in new funding, with a total of almost half a billion ongoing projects.
“We actually expect that will get bigger. Literally, that will become a bigger and bigger piece of our pie,” said Mark McLellan, Vice President for Research and Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, “and we owe that to our faculty.”
To the Office of Research and Graduate Studies, research is formalized curiosity. Research funding, then, is the freedom to be curious. For many of the 800 faculty members on campus, research is a growing portion of their contracts.
In Simon Wang’s contract, he is required to spend 65 percent of his time researching and 35 percent of his time in a classroom. A professor and College Researcher of the Year for the College of Agriculture & Applied Sciences, Wang thinks his research enhances his teaching, and the two are heavily connected. Because of that his curriculum is constantly evolving, especially with his emphasis on climatology.
“I would feel bored, myself, if I followed one textbook and I went over that for 10 years,” Wang said. “We’re connected to life and daily news, and so we have a lot of new things to talk about.”
Wang said he was fortunate to be selected as a college researcher of the year, but he knows there were equally qualified candidates all over campus.
It is professors like Wang, with passion and drive, who get funded. Grants come from federal agencies and private companies, and it is getting increasingly difficult to rely on one source of funding. In many fields, professors have to make their research relevant to average people in order to generate interest from these groups.
Wang, for one, likes the challenge.
“You have to, in today’s world, have this maneuverability to tell your research,” he said. “I like the fact that I get to engage. Eventually, weather research and climate research have to connect to people’s lives.”
Bruce Bugbee is the 2016 D. Wynne Thorne Career Research Award recipient, and while he is being honored for his research, he considers himself a full-time teacher.
“Even though we’re proud of bringing in a lot of money, it’s about a lot more than money,” he said. “Not many people think of USU for research, but I think we do a better job than Harvard and Stanford in undergraduate research.”
Giving his undergraduate researchers the opportunity to learn outside of the classroom is unique to USU, Bugbee said.
Even if it isn’t all about money, he said the credit goes to USU’s individual faculty members for achieving record-breaking funding.
“It’s a steady emphasis on faculty doing research, doing excellent scholarship, and that leads to people seeking more money in more places,” he said. “You get 800 people doing that, and you set a record for the university.”
There are some other — minor — factors that affect research funding, including inflation. Additionally some years ago the university started considering gifts, like lab instruments, research funding.
Although faculty members are individually seeking funding, the university provides regular training sessions for things like making quality slideshows, making lasting impressions, and beautifying graphics and data plots.
“These trainings that are really practical. There’s no magic here,” McLellan said. “It’s really just a very basic approach to taking our science and making it exciting and understandable.”
Even if research doesn’t seem to affect average students, McLellan said the university is benefiting as a whole because of it.
“We see it as a holistic picture — you’re trying to lift everything at once,” he said. “The rising tide raises all boats.”
— brennakelly818@gmail.com