Boston University is playing in the ‘big league’ as a research institution this year, bringing in a total that is expected to exceed $300 million in research grants, $25 million more than last year, BU officials said last week.
BU’s ability to compete for bigger projects and grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation fueled the increase, according to BU officials.
‘BU has always been good at bringing in the smaller grants to fund a single professor’s work,’ explained Professor Jeff Hughes, the principal investigator for BU’s Center for the Study of Space Weather. ‘The difference is now we’re getting into the big league where we’re winning the huge multi-million dollar projects.’
The Center for the Study of Space Weather is one of BU’s departments that recently won multiple grants, worth $40 million dollars in total. The center will study space weather and work to build a computer simulation program to predict weather in space, Hughes said.
‘Competition was really fierce for this,’ Hughes said. ‘This was huge for us.’
Professor Suprya Chakrabarti, principal investigator on the university’s biggest win this year a project funded by NASA and worth $90 million said this year’s grants are ‘off the charts.’
The NASA project, called SPIDER, is a satellite mission designed to take inventory of the masses and matter in the universe. BU professors, grad students and undergraduates work to build the satellite, which should be launched in 2005 and operate for at least three years, Chakrabarti said.
In addition to the more extensive programs, BU has also been very successful in winning smaller grants to promote research projects on campus, including the Center for Computational Science, the Center for Chemical Methodology and Libraries program, BU officials said.
‘There have been a lot of areas we’ve had considerable success in,’ said CAS associate dean Scott Whitaker. ‘The important thing to recognize is that research is built on the work of individual faculty, and our faculty are experiencing a high level of success at every level.
‘Whether people are hunting for whales or for mice, what matters is that you catch the game you need.’
The University is eyeing future projects in collaboration with other universities to establish a biological research facility near the medical campus including a biological containment lab for looking at hazardous materials, Whitaker said.
BU faculty and administration take pride in the increased number of grants, several members said.
‘The high level of sponsored funding for faculty research is an important indication of the quality of our faculty and the support they are able to generate for graduate students and for interesting and important work at Boston University,’ BU Provost Dennis Berkey said in an email.
The money provided by grants supports not only the projects but also subsidizes the efforts of the professors, graduate students and undergraduates who devote their time to the projects, Berkey said. The increase in funds allows more students to get involved than was ever possible in the past, he said.
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