PULLMAN – In the midst of a lingering economic downturn and despite continuing reductions in state funding, WSU faculty and researchers have achieved more than a 40 percent increase in the amount of outside research and other grant funding awarded over the past two fiscal years.
 |
| Grimes |
Howard Grimes
, WSU vice president of research and Graduate School dean, said the university processed a record $218.33 million in grant awards during the 2009-2010 fiscal year. The total represents nearly a 26 percent increase over the $173.88 million in grants awarded WSU in FY 2009 and a 42 percent increase over the $154.1 awarded in FY 2008.“Even as we have faced some of the most significant economic challenges in recent memory, we have continued to compete successfully for new sources of funding for the type of world-class research and scholarship that has long distinguished WSU as a land-grant university and a major research institution,” said Grimes. “This is a tremendous accomplishment and our faculty, researchers and support staff are to be congratulated.”
Biggest contributors
WSU received more than $137 million in federal grant awards and more than $80 million in nonfederal grant awards during the 2010 fiscal year, Grimes said. The university’s two largest grant contributors during the period were the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which awarded 214 grants totaling slightly more than $30 million, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which awarded 120 grants totaling more than $25 million.
Biggest recipients
Academically, Grimes said the discipline receiving the most grants at WSU during the recent fiscal year was agriculture, which served as the focus for nearly 700 individual grant awards. A total of 165 of the grants awarded WSU related to the social sciences, while the fields of biology and medicine accounted for 138 and 137 individual grants, respectively.
Notable new grant award recipients during the past fiscal year included:
- John Roll, associate dean of research with the WSU School of Nursing, who received $4.05 million from the Life Science Discovery Fund
- Matthew Whiting, horticulturist at WSU Prosser, who received $3.9 million from the USDA
-
Brian Lamb, Regent’s professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who received $3.03 million from the NSF
-
Diane Cook, professor of the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who received $3 million from the NSF
-
Michael Morgan, professor of psychology at WSU Vancouver, who received $2.4 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Sciences/National Institute of Health.