05
December
2002
|
18:00 PM
America/New_York

Ohio State University research funding breaks new record

COLUMBUS – Research funding at The Ohio State University nearly doubled over the last five years, reaching a level of $426 million for the 2001-2002 fiscal year, according to a report received today by the university’s Board of Trustees.

C. Bradley Moore, vice president of research at Ohio State, described the growth as “clearly awesome” and an indication of how well the institution is doing toward reaching its goal of becoming one of the world’s top research universities.

The $426 million in research awards represents a 13 percent increase over last year’s totals but is 80 percent more than the university received in 1997-1998.

“Ohio State is opening new areas of research and establishing itself as the leader in key areas,” Moore told the Board. “The research opportunities that we are opening now are bigger, more exciting and more intellectually challenging than ever before.”

Much of the success in increased research funding, Moore said, can be traced to Ohio State faculty who have been writing more proposals, bigger proposals and enjoying a higher success rate with them than ever before. In the 2001-2002 fiscal year, 3,782 university research proposals were selected for funding – an increase 8 percent in one year.

Ohio State still continues to rank highly among American universities in receiving research support from industry, ranking fifth nationally. Only Duke, Penn State, MIT, and Georgia Institute of Technology ranked higher.

In 2000-2001, the university climbed to 43rd place in the National Science Foundation’s peer ranking of awards, a jump from 46th place a year ago and from 53rd place just two years earlier.

A similar measure by the National Institutes of Health placed Ohio State at 53rd place in 2000-2001, a move from 57th place the previous year.

In 2001-2002, research awards to Ohio State faculty from NSF increased by 35.2 percent and by 22.1 percent from NIH.

“The success of our faculty and research programs during the last year and the five years before that is truly inspiring,” Moore said. “We have the momentum going now and I expect great things from Ohio State research in the coming years, achievements that will well serve the people of Ohio, the nation and the world.”

Ohio State also fared well in the first round of competition for the tobacco funding component of Gov. Bob Taft’s Third Frontier Program, earning $6.5 million to fund a cardiovascular bioengineering enterprise and $6 million for a biomedical informatics synthesis platform (BISP) led by Dr. Joel Saltz, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and associate vice president for health sciences information systems.

Saltz told trustees the collaborative BISP effort, involving numerous Ohio State scholars and Ohio Supercomputer Center staff, will result in the development of software and databases carrying the potential to speed the transfer of research advancements to clinical care settings.

Partnering with Rescentris, a local life sciences information management company, the researchers will place scientific and clinical data in the context of a map of the human genome, eventually simplifying the computations and analyses that can add years to research projects.

Through this integration of information management with the practice of medicine, scientists worldwide will be able to obtain and share concise data needed for furthering research initiatives. Software users will have access to a virtual data warehouse and a collection of databases holding images and data concerning everything from gene expression and tissue samples to patient information and demographics.

The availability of such a powerful research tool, Saltz said, is likely to decrease the cost of clinical research, and ultimately should increase the effectiveness of treatments and advance research efforts to find cures for some of the world’s most devastating diseases, including cancer and heart disease.