Research is a half-billion-dollar annual enterprise at the University of Arizona.
Last year, buoyed by stimulus spending and a federal budget earmark or two, research grants, gifts and contracts brought in nearly the combined revenue from tuition and direct tax dollars.
A big chunk of that money comes from the federal government - and as the president and Congress trim the deficit, university researchers brace for funding cuts, attacks on winning proposals and ideological snipes at areas such as climate research.
President Obama said he wants continued investment in most scientific areas, specifically clean energy. The budget he recommended Monday proposes increases in the biggest sources of federal research money - the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, meanwhile, voted in January to roll back all discretionary spending to 2008 levels. Its continuing resolution for this year proposes broad and specific cuts in research funding.
It has invited people to visit an Internet site that takes aim at grants by the National Science Foundation.
"We're really aware of the fact that nobody knows what the funding agencies are going to have available to them, but everybody knows it's not going to be good news," said Leslie Tolbert, UA vice president for research.
"It's going to be interesting, said Rick Myers of the Arizona Board of Regents, the governing board for the university system.
The regents recently challenged the universities to increase funded research from $900 million to $2 billion annually by 2020.
About 60 to 65 percent of that money comes from the federal government. If cuts come, Myers said, "we'll have to grow the nonfederal part of it."
The money doesn't go simply to equipment and salaries, said Myers.
It pays interest and maintenance on buildings, supports faculty and graduate students, and involves undergraduates in significant pursuits, he said.
"If we didn't have research, we wouldn't have this higher quality of instruction."
Climate researcher Jonathan Overpeck, co-director of the UA's Institute of the Environment, said research money "gives us a little resilience in the face of the state budget cuts."
It is critical nationally, Overpeck said.
"We innovate better than other countries because of science. If we start cutting these research dollars across the board, it's going to be hobbling one of the biggest moneymakers we have in this country."
A good year
Last year, it was all good news. In addition to a steady rise in grants snared, the university benefited from money made available for stimulating the economy, getting $83 million in grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, known as ARRA.
The UA reported grants, awards and contracts from all sources at nearly $602 million for the year ending June 30, 2010.
By comparison, tuition and registration fees contributed an estimated $329.5 million, and the state gave $344.6 million.
Some of the grant money, which includes gifts, industry contracts and local government grants, will be spent in future years.
The UA spent nearly $490 million on research and development in the year that ended June 30, 2010.
The stimulus funding created a bubble, Tolbert said, that won't be repeated.
Now, says one outside expert, universities nationwide face a chasm.
"Any way you look at it, this is going to cost a lot of scientists and would-be scientists a lot of jobs and opportunities," said Jim Gentile, president of the Tucson-based Research Corporation for Science Advancement.
Plan for growth
UA officials remain optimistic that they can sustain and even ramp up their award-winning ways in areas they have traditionally dominated, such as astronomy, space sciences and optical sciences.
They plan to compete even harder in medicine and biotechnology, where their share of money from the National Institutes of Health, the biggest source of federal research funds, has lagged, Tolbert said.
Engineering Dean Jeff Goldberg said researchers also need to concentrate on funding sources that won't be cut. "Defense is going to be strongly supported, so we need to be stronger in those sorts of things. We also need to be better in how we work with local industry," Goldberg said.
The regents want the UA to focus on medicine and biotechnology, doubling grants in the next decade.
The UA also wants to build on investments made over the past few years in environmental and climate science, where it has created a new institute and is transforming Biosphere 2 into one big scientific laboratory.
Joaquin Ruiz, dean of the College of Science, said the UA will be competitive for whatever federal money is available, but he fears losing momentum if cuts in federal and other government sources continue.
He said his bigger concern is the impact of dwindling state support on the university's teaching mission and the impact of rising tuition on would-be students.
Almost independent
The east end of campus is historically flush with grants and contracts.
At the College of Optical Sciences, faculty are nearly independent of the vagaries of state budgeting. Their grants and contracts from about 200 different sources brought in $29 million last year - 90 percent of the college's budget.
Junior faculty might be supported for up to two years, said retiring Dean Jim Wyant, but after that they are expected to fully fund their own salaries, buy their own equipment and employ their own technicians and graduate students.
Federal grants are part of the mix, Wyant said, but much of the college's money comes from business partnerships and other sources of funding.
Still, there is some worry, especially in space sciences.
NASA and the astrophysical arm of the National Science Foundation are saddled with some large projects with big cost overruns. The next generation of big Earth-bound telescopes and space missions are all predicated on steadily rising budgets.
Still, an anticipated bad year could easily turn into a banner one for the Lunar and Planetary Lab, which brought in $26.5 million last year. Director Mike Drake and his team are finalists for a NASA mission to a nearby asteroid worth $350 million.
Science can't expect to be shielded from economic woes, said Peter Strittmatter, head of the Department of Astronomy and director of Steward Observatory, which brought in $80 million in funding last year.
"A lot of people are unemployed. They've lost their their homes. Reductions in space funding and overall federal funding will certainly have to be made," he said.
Strittmatter said Steward brings in $4 to $5 for every dollar spent by the state, and it comes from a variety of sources, but "a significant fraction is federal money."
Steward has snared contracts for pieces of the largest astronomical projects around, he said. Marcia Rieke is building a camera for the James Webb Space Telescope, NIRCAM, which was the recipient of $10 million in stimulus funding last year. It is also building the $100 million optics package for the Giant Magellan Telescope and partnering with the Tucson-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.
The UA is also positioned to be part of the president's investment in clean energy, he said, with Roger Angel, the Steward Mirror Lab's founder, now turning his attention to solar energy. "That could be another big project," he said.
Climate, environment
Travis Huxman, director of Biosphere 2 and Flandrau Science Center, said he and his colleagues in environmental science would like to mimic the space side of campus.
He said Drake, the director of the Lunar and Planetary Lab, recently told him he needed proposals "with a lot more zeroes behind them."
At Biosphere 2 and in the recently created Institute of the Environment, that challenge is being addressed with a focus on campuswide proposals that address the overall effects of climate variability, particularly in the Southwest.
The UA has a long history of climate research, Huxman said - a response to the fact that we live in a semi-arid region where resources such as water and soil were critical to our sustainability, long before that term came into vogue.
"Most people focused on climate are focused on very practical issues," Huxman said, "but in today's political climate it's difficult to not be ensnared in arguments.
Many of the cuts in current spending proposed by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives take aim at climate-change science.
The administration, meanwhile, has made it a priority, particularly in spending for energy security proposals. The biggest gap in proposals by the president and Congress comes in the Department of Energy, which has been ramping up its funding of such research under Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
The UA's largest stimulus grant - $13 million over five years - established an Energy Frontier Research Center, headquartered in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, to pursue advances in thin-film solar photovoltaic energy.
Medicine
The push for more research funding by the regents falls "disproportionately on the UA's College of Medicine, said Myers. Last year's consolidation of the college with University Medical Center and its physician group creates an opportunity to build a true medical research center, he said.
The big federal target is funding from the National Institutes of Health.
"NIH is the biggest funder," said Tolbert. "We are in the top echelon (of research universities) because space sciences and optical sciences bring in money," she said. "We are nowhere near where we should be in biomedical."
Tolbert said she'd like to see medicine, which brought in an overall $152 million last year, emulate the Cancer Center, where a small group of researchers brought in nearly $35 million.
The key, Tolbert said, is the kind of cross-disciplinary work exemplified by the scientists in the university's Bio5 Institute, where genomics and plant sciences have brought in continuing multimillion dollar grants and the push is on for development of therapies that will translate into businesses.
Said Tolbert, "We need to figure out where we are unique, what do we do best and help our investigators think about places where we have a particular advantage."
GOP website seeks to identify waste
Republican leaders in Congress are enlisting the public to help them cut programs and identify waste.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor invites visitors to his "YouCut" website to vote for programs to be eliminated.
A link from there leads you to Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., who specifically targets the National Science Foundation, and supplies visitors with a link to search NSF-funded proposals.
In a YouTube video, he singles out a couple of past proposals - $750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the conduct of soccer players and $1.2 million to model the sound of things breaking.
The site suggests some search terms that might turn up other wacky proposals - "success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus β¦"
Leslie Tolbert, the UA's vice president for research, wasn't familiar with the website, but said the tactic is an old one.
"What they're doing generally is searching titles of grants," said Tolbert. "It's such an easy and false way of judging the quality and potential impact of grants that it's very frustrating to us."
Federal agencies receive at least 10 times more proposals than they can fund, she said. "They have been through a vetting process like few others. ... You don't get funded unless you make a pretty strong case right upfront that what you're doing is worthwhile."
Engineering Dean Jeff Goldberg said one way to avoid controversy it to carefully choose your words. "I've told my guys 'No catchy titles,'" he said.
Contact reporter Tom Beal at 573-4158 or tbeal@azstarnet.com - Tom Beal
