Category Archives: Funding

Bell Labs Graduate Research Fellowship Program

The Bell Labs Graduate Research Fellowship Program (link broken by idiots) is designed to increase the number of minorities and women in the fields of science, math, engineering and technology. Fellowships are awarded to women and members of a underrepresented minority groups who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

The program is primarily directed to graduating college seniors, but applications from first-year graduate students will be considered in the following fields: Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Communications Science, Computer Science/Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Information Science, Materials Science, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Operations Research, Physics and Statistics.

Update: Why are huge companies not even able to follow the most basic web usability concepts. It is amazing to me how incompetent these people are. This link works (even just looking at the url you can tell this is likely to die soon – I have yet to see a well planned web site that uses such a completely lame url) – for who knows how long. Would someone please hurry up and replace idiots that can’t follow the simple web practices with someone who does and let those who don’t copy textbooks by hand or whatever they are able to do.

R&D Spending in USA Universities

National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, Academic Research and Development Expenditures: Fiscal Year 2004, NSF 06-323 provides a view of R&D spending at universities in the USA.

Spending over the last 5 years in billions: $30.7 in 2000; 32.8; 36.4; 40.1 and $42.9 in 2004. For 2004 the funding source for the spending was:

Federal Government: $27.4
State and Local: 2.8
Industry: 2.1
Institutional: 7.8
All other: 2.8

Also for 2004 of the total $32.3 billion was for basic research and $10.6 billion for applied research and development.

The schools spending the largest amounts on R&D in 2004 and the spending in millions:

Johns Hopkins $1,375
UCLA 773
Univ of Michigan (all) 769
UW – Madison 764
UC – San Francisco 728
Univ Washington 714
UC – San Diego 709
Stanford 671

The publication includes a huge amount of data on current spending and historical spending.

China challenges dominance of USA, Europe and Japan

China challenges dominance of USA, Europe and Japan in scientific research according to UNESCO Science Report 2005

The report says that “the most remarkable trend is to be found in Asia, where gross expenditure on R&D has grown from a world share of 27.9% in 1997 to 31.5% in 2002”.

This hardly seems impressive compared to the growth of Google say. However the amounts of money for global R&D are huge and so changes as less dramatic than other areas. Still this is significant and seems likely to continue to move in this direction.
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Basic Science Research Funding

Excellent summary from the European Union.

National Basic Research Program of China

America’s economy is losing its competitive edge and Washington hasn’t noticed by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

For decades, the United States ranked first in the world in the percentage of its GDP devoted to scientific research; now, we’ve dropped behind Japan, Korea, Israel, Sweden, and Finland. The number of scientific papers published by Americans peaked in 1992 and has fallen 10 percent; a decade ago, the United States led the world in scientific publications, but now it trails Europe. For two centuries, a higher proportion of Americans had gone to university than have citizens of any other country; now several nations in Asia and Europe have caught up.

The Emergence of China as a Leading Nation in Science by Ping Zhoua and Loet Leydesdorff:

China has become the fifth leading nation in terms of its share of the world’s scientific publications. The citation rate of papers with a Chinese address for the corresponding author also exhibits exponential growth.

Singapore woos top scientists with new labs

Singapore woos top scientists with new labs, research money by Paul Elias:

Singapore’s siren song is growing increasingly more irresistible for scientists, especially stem cell researchers who feel stifled by the U.S. government’s restrictions on their field.

Two prominent California scientists are the latest to defect to the Asian city-state, announcing earlier this month that they, too, had fallen for its glittering acres of new laboratories outfitted with the latest gizmos.

They weren’t the first defections, and Singapore officials at the Biotechnology Organization’s annual convention in Chicago this week promise they won’t be the last.

Other Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea and even China, are also here touting their burgeoning biotechnology spending to the 20,000 scientists and biotechnology executives attending the conference.
…
In all, the country has managed to recruit about 50 senior scientists — far short of what it needs, but a start for a tiny country of 4.5 million people off the tip of Malaysia.

Another 1,800 younger scientists from all corners of the world staff the Biopolis laboratories, which were built with $290 million in government funding and another $400 million in private investment by the two dozen biotechnology companies based there. Biopolis opened in 2003 and contains seven buildings spread over 10 acres and connected by sky bridges

$1 Million Each for 20 Science Educators

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Names 20 New Million-Dollar Professors – Top Research Scientists Tapped for their Teaching Talent:

“The scientists whom we have selected are true pioneers—not only in their research, but in their creative approaches and dedication to teaching,” said Thomas R. Cech, HHMI president. “We are hopeful that their educational experiments will energize undergraduate science education throughout the nation.”

The Institute awarded $20 million to the first group of HHMI professors in 2002 to bring the excitement of scientific discovery to the undergraduate classroom.

The experiment worked so well that neurobiologist and HHMI professor Darcy Kelley convinced Columbia University to require every entering freshman to take a course on hot topics in science. Through Utpal Bannerjee’s HHMI program at the University of California, Los Angeles, 138 undergraduates were co-authors of a peer-reviewed article in a top scientific journal. At the University of Pittsburgh, HHMI professor Graham Hatfull’s undergraduates mentored curious high school students as they unearthed and analyzed more than 30 never-before-seen bacteriophages from yards and barnyards. And Isiah Warner, an award-winning chemist and HHMI professor at Louisiana State University, developed a “mentoring ladder,” a hierarchical model for integrating research, education, and peer mentoring, with a special emphasis on underrepresented minority students.

UK Science and Innovation Grants

UK Science and Innovation Grants

The recipients of the second round of Science and Innovation Awards have been announced by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Funding has been awarded to build the UK’s research base in the areas of nanometrology, statistics, plasma physics and the Mathematics-Computer Science interface.

Professor John O’Reilly, Chief Executive of EPSRC, said: “A strong research base in engineering and the physical sciences is vital to the UK’s success as a knowledge economy. These latest awards underscore EPSRC’s commitment, working in partnership with the Funding Councils and the Department for Employment and Learning Northern Ireland, to address shortages of academics to lead research teams in some crucially important areas.”
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Funding Basic Research

The West has lost the will to fund basic research by William Brody.

In the US, university basic research has withered in many important fields, especially in the physical and information sciences and engineering.
…
Industrial basic research has failed to demonstrate a return on investment that satisfies the ravenous appetite of financial markets for short-term earnings growth. As a result, companies have been directing capital to applied research and development, rather than basic invention and innovation.

The writer is president of the Johns Hopkhins University, the co-founder of three medical device companies and co-chairman of the US Council on Competitiveness’s National Innovation Initiative.

Science and Engineering Fellowships Legislation

Senators will propose legislation to spur innovation from InfoWorld:

John Ensign, a Nevada Republican, Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat with support announced by four other senators will propose legislation that establishes 5,000 science and engineering fellowships, redirects 3 percent of government agency R&D spending to specific areas of research and provides automatic green cards for graduate engineering students, the senators said Wednesday.

And on the same topic, Senators Promise ‘Brain Drain’ Bill:

According to Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), the U.S. is averaging 50,000 engineering graduates a year, with 40 percent of those from overseas. India is averaging 150,000 engineering graduates a year while China is graduating 250,000 engineers every year.

Science Funding Dips In U.S. While Soaring In China

Science Funding Dips In U.S. While Soaring In China by Cynthia Tucker, Editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Writing this month in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., and Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate in physics, said:

“As a percentage of GDP, federal investment in physical science research is half of what it was in 1970. (By contrast), in China, R&D expenditures rose 350 percent between 1991 and 2001, and the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s soared 535 percent.”

Update: link broken so removed the link to the original article.