Research at UO nets impressive financing.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Researchers seeking everything from developing more powerful vitamins to better ways of teaching kindergartners to read helped the University of Oregon set another record for research funding last year.

UO faculty brought in $90.2 million in outside grants and contracts in 2003-04, boosting research funding by 16 percent over the previous year's record of $78 million. In the past three years, outside research support has grown 56 percent.

As in the past three years, research generated more revenue than the entire state appropriation for university operations, which runs about $60 million a year right now. Rich Linton, the UO's vice president for research, said that underscores how important outside funding is to the university's research mission.

"Just a few years ago, state funding was greater than our sponsored research funding," he said. "So it's obviously an essential part of our funding base and critical to support faculty research."

More than 85 percent of the funding came directly or indirectly from the federal government, and most of that came through competitive grants in which researchers go head-to-head with counterparts across the country for limited funds. The top sources were the Department of Education, which provided 33 percent of the UO's funding, the Department of Health and Human Services with 32 percent and the National Science Foundation with 16 percent.

The remainder came from private foundations or in the form of training grants and research fellowships.

The awards covered an array of projects in the sciences, humanities and professions. Almost 600 awards came in last year, spearheaded by 224 principal researchers.

Just one example is the work being done by chemistry professor Bruce Branchaud, who received a $198,000 grant from the American Heart Association to continue research into vitamins and antioxidants. Branchaud said such chemicals have enormous potential to prevent disease, but research into them is just in its infancy.

Just as many other powerful medicines have arisen from natural remedies, such as aspirin developed from willow bark. Branchaud believes that research into antioxidants could lead to medicines that prevent diseases such as cancer and heart disease and that slow the aging process.

"What I'm trying to do is get started on developing antioxidants and vitamins in the same way that people have developed drugs into sophisticated medications," he said. "My idea is to say, nature has given us a superb start on what's good for us, but everything we've seen with the way medications have been developed in the last hundred years tells us that if we apply ourselves to the problem, we can do better."

One of the top research generators for the UO again is the College of Education, which brought in 30 percent of last year's total. Faculty members there are among the most productive in the nation in terms of research dollars per person.

Among the new projects in the college is a $1.67 million grant to establish the National Reading First Technical Assistance Center, one of only three such centers in the country. Professor Ed Kameenui, a national expert in reading research, heads the center, which helps schools with training and materials needed to meet requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The center, which serves 22 Western states, helps schools choose reading programs and set up procedures to screen students, diagnose problems and monitor results. He said with so many different reading tools available on the market, the center offers research-based advice for making choices.

"There's so much stuff out there, and a lot of it's junk," Kameenui said. "We're really helping them make the decision."

Although harder to get, research funding also sometimes helps upgrade buildings and equipment. UO geology professor Paul Wallace helped secure a $548,000 grant for a new electron microprobe, a device that allows researchers to do chemical analyses on samples as small as 1 micron.

The instrument will replace one that is more than 15 years old and will allow investigators to do more advanced studies.

"So we can really kind of push the envelope in terms of our research with the new instrument in ways that we couldn't with the old one," Wallace said.

While the UO doesn't bring in as much overall research funding as Oregon State University, whose total outside awards topped $177 million last year, Linton points out that such comparisons don't take into account the schools' differing missions. As a land grant university, OSU is able to bring in funding for agriculture, forestry and extension programs for which the UO can't compete.

But he noted that the UO's average research funding per faculty member is close to $150,000, and he said that compares favorably with much larger universities.

"We're not at the scale of a University of Washington or the University of California system, but if you compare what we do with the number of faculty that we have, we're very competitive," he said. "I think it's just another recognition of the quality of the scholars that we have."