The $132 million granted to the University was the result of 1,516 awards to researchers that ranged from less than $1,000 to more than $5.5 million. Of the total, grants to the medical school accounted for $87 million, or 66 percent; grants to Yerkes totaled $14 million, or 11 percent; grants to Emory College totaled $13.25 million, or 10 percent; grants to public health totaled $12.5 million, or 9 percent; and grants to the Graduate School totaled $518,526, or less than one percent.
According to Associate Vice President for Research Ann Stevens, significant increases from last year include the College, up 34 percent from $9.87 million; Yerkes, up 18 percent from $12.06 million; public health, up 12 percent from $11.13 million; and the medical school, up 10 percent from $79.37 million.
Federal funding of sponsored research is up just over $9 million from last year. Of the $132 million, $96.55 million, or 73 percent, is from federal sources. Corporate funding accounts for $12.74 million, down from $13.5 million last year, and private funding at $10.4 million is up from last year's figure of $8 million.
Grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both highly competitive sources of federal funding, were up this year. Funds from NIH totaled just over $76 million, up from $70.45 million last year; NSF funding jumped from $2.29 million last year to $5.26 million this year.
Acknowledging this remarkable achievement, Provost Billy Frye noted, "In the nine and a half years I have been at Emory I have seen the level of external sponsorship grow from around $30 million to more than $l30 million. This is a remarkable testimony to the quality and vitality of our faculty, especially in the sciences where research in most fields simply cannot be done without such sponsorship."
Frye added that it is important to acknowledge that there has been similar progress in areas that do not customarily have access to such external funding. "Witness, for example," he said, " the recent ranking of the `scholarly productivity' of our law school faculty ahead of such prestigious schools as Vanderbilt, Duke and Virginia by the Chicago-Kent Law Review; or the publication of 22 books and almost 50 articles and reviews by the faculty of the Candler School of Theology, recently ranked among the top five in the nation. Similar evidence of the growing scholarly excellence of our faculty can be found throughout the University. In addition to its intrinsic value, scholarship is, of course, seminal to the outstanding teaching and everything else that our faculty do."
Funding also includes training grants, such as Department of Family and Preventive Medicine Chair Lawrence Lutz's three grants from the Bureau of Health Professions for more than $320,000 and Professor of Cardiology Wayne Alexander's NIH grant of $177,293 for research training in academic cardiology.
There are grants to fund centers, such as the $285,000 grant from the Department of Education to Professor of Educational Studies Jacqueline Irvine for the Center for Urban Learning/Teaching and Urban Research (CULTURES) and the $297,168 Cancer Center Planning Grant from NIH to Howard Ozer, director of the Winship Cancer Center. Professor of Pathology Suzanne Mirra was awarded an $823,089 grant from NIH to fund the Alzheimer's Disease Center, and Associate Professor of Dermatology S. Wright Caughman received a $626,823 grant from NIH to fund the Skin Disease Research Center. Yerkes Primate Research Center received an NIH grant of $5.56 million for its core facility.
Research grants fund both projects that are close to home and those that are international in scope, those that are immediately applicable and those that have more esoteric leanings. Richard Joseph, Candler Professor of Political Science, was awarded $750,000 from the U.S. Agency for International Development for "Project Liberia: A Proposal for Restoring Peace and Building Democracy," and Woodruff Professor of International Nutrition Reynaldo Martorell received a $441,306 NIH grant to study the generational effects of malnutrition in Guatemala. Dennis Liotta, chair of the chemistry department, received a $1.7 million NSF grant to fund renovations for chemistry research, and Kenneth Gould, chief of reproductive biology at Yerkes, received an NIH grant of more than $375,000 to study the artificial breeding of chimpanzees. Professor of Pharmacology Jyh-Fa Kuo received more than $350,000 from NIH to research the role that calcium and phospholipids play in the heart, and Dean of Nursing Dyanne Affonso received an NIH grant of more than $825,000 to study community approaches to prenatal care.
Grants to researchers such as Kim Wallen cross disciplines and departments. Wallen, who has a joint appointment in psychology and at Yerkes, received a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health to study behavioral development and prenatal hormonal influences.
-- Nancy M. Spitler