Sponsored research funding at UChicago increases more than 8 percent in 2010

Newswise — The University of Chicago received $512 million in sponsored research funding and 2,528 awards in fiscal year 2010, surpassing previous-year funding by 8.5 percent. Sixty-three awards were for more than $I million.

Eighty-four percent of total funding was from federal agencies; the remainder from non-federal sponsors (corporations, foundations, other non-profit organizations and state and local governments). Federal funding increased 20 percent from last year while non-federal funding decreased by one-third due, in part, to a spike created last year from two very large private foundation awards.

Two-thirds of the University’s total federal funding was from the Department of Health and Human Services, primarily the National Institutes of Health. DHHS funding increased 18 percent or $43.3 million from last year. The University received 841 awards from the NIH; four out of five of the top NIH awards were for ongoing support of existing research centers:

Center: The Midwest Center for Structural Genomics
Award: $10.5 million
Principal investigator: Andrzej Joachimiak, Senior Fellow of the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology and the Computation Institute

Center: Great Lakes Regional Center for Excellence
Award: $7 million
Principal investigator: Olaf Schneewind, the Louis Block Professor and Chair of Microbiology, Committee on Microbiology, Director Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence

Center: The University of Chicago Cancer Research Center
Award: $4.4 million
Principal investigator: Michelle Le Beau, Professor in Medicine and Director of the University of Chicago Cancer Research Center

Center: The Chicago Systems Biology Center for the Study of Transcriptional Networks
Award: $3.5 million
Principal investigator: Kevin White, the James and Karen Frank Family Professor in Human Genetics and Department of Ecology & Evolution; Director, Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at UChicago and Argonne National Laboratory

The National Science Foundation provided one-fifth of total federal funding to the University, a 25 percent increase from last year. The University received 212 NSF awards, among them:

• John Carlstrom, Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Physics and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, received two grants totaling $5.2 million to support cosmological research at the South Pole Telescope, a collaboration of nine U.S. and Canadian institutions that operates at the NSF South Pole research station.
• Ian Foster, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in Computer Science and Director of the Computation Institute, received $30 million for continued expansion of the TeraGrid, a national system of interconnected supercomputers devoted to leading-edge scientific discovery and science and technology education.
• Ka Yee C. Lee, Professor in Chemistry, Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, James Franck Institute and the College, received $2.9 million for the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, which conducts innovative research to produce design principles for the next generation of materials.
• Stephan Meyer, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Physics; Deputy Director, Enrico Fermi Institute; and Associate Director, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, received $3 million for KICP to continue its mission to further understanding of the birth and earliest evolution of the Universe.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding from federal agencies accounted for about 16 percent of total UChicago sponsored research funding. UChicago received 188 ARRA awards including:

• Michael Hopkins, Professor of Chemistry, received $3.4 million to construct a biomedical cleanroom to support basic research in biomedical science.
• Timothy Knowles, the John Dewey Director and Clinical Professor of the Urban Education Institute, received $11 .6 million from the Department of Education to support UEI’s efforts to refine and expand its successful teacher preparation program to improve the quality of teacher training, particularly in high-need urban areas.
• Jerry Krishnan, Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Studies; Director, Asthma and COPD Center; Director, Refractory Obstructive Lung Disorders Clinic, received $3.9 million to develop a national research infrastructure, including a registry (COPD DataHub), for studies that will improve the care and outcomes of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
• Carole Ober, the Blum-Riese Professor of Human Genetics, Obstetrics and Gynecology, received $5.65 million from the NIH to study the genetic underpinnings of asthma by combining data from 30,000 subjects at 10 U.S. research institutions.
• Julian Solway, the Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics; Associate Dean for Translational Medicine; Vice-Chair for Research, Department of Medicine; Chairman, Committee on Molecular Medicine, received $4.85 million from NIH for the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Award to prepare the next generation of clinical and translational researchers to reduce health disparities in our community by making widely available effective and personalized therapies.

Other awards included:

• Robert Fogel, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions, received $697,172 from the NIH to study early indicators of later work levels as they correlate to disease and death.
• Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology, Comparative Human Development and the College, received $1.5 million from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to examine language growth in the face of environmental and biological variation. This work is part of a five-year study to shed light on factors that contribute to the gap between children from high versus low socioeconomic groups with the goal of one day shrinking that gap.
• Deborah Gorman Smith, Research Fellow at Chapin Hall and Principal Investigator and Director of the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, received $1.3 from the Centers for Disease Control to further research to build an integrative approach to address youth violence within poor, inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago.
• Dwight Hopkins, Professor of Theology, received $346,500 from the Ford Foundation for The International Association of Black Religions and Spiritualities, in support of education and advocacy around the issues of human dignity and justice for poor communities and oppressed people in 14 countries.
• James Nye, interim director of the South Asia Language Resource Center, Director South Asia Language and Area Center and Bibliographer Southern Asia, received $332,000 from the Department of Education for the South Asia Language Resource Center to further South Asian language pedagogy in American universities.
• Jens Ludwig, the McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy, received $450,526 from the Centers for Disease Control to study youth violence and housing programs to de-concentrate poverty. He also received $333,956 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study neighborhood effects on health.
• Robert Topel, the Isidore Brown and Gladys J. Brown Distinguished Service Professor in Urban and Labor Economics, received $407,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to conduct a life-cycle cost analysis for commercial-sized and small modular reactors.