Researchers bringing in funding
Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series about the university’s research funding and some of its research programs.
Utah State University announced Sept. 2 that it brought in a school record of $220 million for research funding in the 2014 fiscal year.
One of these projects includes the work of Michelle Baker, an adjunct professor at USU, with iUtah establishing a network to examine Utah’s water systems.
“The overall goal of iUtah is to build research capacity to influence understanding of water sustainability in Utah and our region more generally,” Baker said.
Her research has expanded out of Cache Valley and across the state.
“We built an environmental observatory which is basically a set of networked instruments in the Wasatch Front to understand what happens to water as it goes from the mountains in to our cities,” Baker said. “The instruments are installed in the Logan River, Red Butte Creek and Little Provo River and we chose those watersheds because they kind of represent different stages of urban development.”
In addition to bringing in funding for her project, adding to the record total, Baker has put together a collaboration with other universities in the state.
“Graduate students are training by faculty from USU and BYU and the University of Utah,” Baker said. “So we’re trying to build a community of scholars that can work together rather than competing against each other.”
The expansive project also offers practical and beneficial training and education to students on numerous levels.
“A big part of it is education,” Baker said. “We have education programs that go from middle school and high school teachers through high school students, undergraduate researchers and graduate students and post-grad students.”
USU professor Ann Austin’s research has also had an impact, not just in Logan, but across the state. In fact, her research led to the establishment of the Office of Child Care in Utah.
Austin has worked with the university for over 30 years. She worked with lawmakers and faith leaders to bring the Office of Child Care to Utah 20 years ago. Today there are child care offices across the state.
“Our Care about Child Care office up here actually leads the state in a number of things,” Austin said. “One is that we have the child care professional development institute, which pulls in more than a million dollars a year by itself. That institute is just really exciting because what we essentially do is help manage and guide and encourage the training for the state.”
The offices host trainings in the evenings for child care providers which help lower the stress of those providers.
“I had thought that it was too much for the providers to come to training at night,” Austin said. “Come to find out they love it. If you hold it, they come.”
Austin’s work provides new techniques for child care providers based on things such as socioeconomic diversity. However Austin says her extensive research doesn’t burden her.
“I don’t even like to say that I’m coming to work, because I don’t work, I play and I’ve played for the last 33 years,” Austin said. “It’s just so much fun to be with the students, with graduate students and then also have that luxury of working around my research.”
The sum of research funding is a point of pride for the university this year. Mark McLellan, vice president of research, emphasized the importance of the funding.
“It allows them to actually perform their work,” McLellan said. “Without that funding they are really greatly hampered in terms of executing projects and getting things done. It’s very important to us that our faculty continue to see this kind of success. And it’s very rewarding to have a sponsor recognize you and your research as something important to them that they want to sponsor.”