Biotechnology junior and undergraduate lab assistant Kriti Chopra puts away glassware in a lab at the Plant Biology Laboratories on Wednesday. A project at the lab is one of the programs that benefits from the stimulus money that MSU received.
Five months ago, Narayanan Parameswaran didn’t have the funding he needed to do research on proteins and the development of atherosclerosis, an inflammatory disease that can cause heart attacks and strokes. Neither did the National Institutes of Health.
NIH initially denied a more than $750,000 grant request submitted by Parameswaran, an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology.
Then, Congress approved the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or ARRA. The ARRA is the federal government’s almost $800 billion effort to create jobs and included about $21 billion for research, which must be spent in the next two years.
MSU received about $26.7 million in federal grants as of Wednesday and officials expect to see the numbers continue to increase in the upcoming months, said Douglas Gage, an assistant to the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. The Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies facilitates research enterprise at MSU and ensures faculty members receive support as they seek external grant funding.
“I think the amount of money we’re going to get is going to continue to go up,” Gage said. “We have several large proposals still pending. The amount of money should increase significantly, but what that number is it’s hard to say.”
Federal agencies received an injection of stimulus dollars after the ARRA passed, giving proposals from Parameswaran and other MSU researchers a second chance to win funding.
NIH approved Parameswaran’s request in June after the agency received about $10.4 billion in stimulus funds.
“Without the funding, no, we could not have done it,” Parameswaran said. “The things that we are doing are pretty extensive. … All we could do at that point was enough for preliminary data for the grant, but we definitely could not have pursued it without the grant.”
MSU researchers submitted more than 200 proposals for grant money awarded under the ARRA, according to MSU’s stimulus funding Web site, stimulusfunding.msu.edu.
Officials created the Web site in an effort to let everyone know exactly where the awarded money is going, Gage said.
Beronda Montgomery, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, received a four-year, $765,249 National Science Foundation grant funded under the ARRA in July. She said the money gives her an opportunity to expand her research, which is concentrated on how specific plant parts react to light.
“We’ve been doing research at what I would say is a minimum,” Montgomery said. “The stimulus funding really allowed us to move the project forward more quickly and more broadly than what we would have been able to do otherwise.”
For MSU faculty members to remain competitive in the fight for funding, Gage said the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies offers about $2.5 million in internal grants.
The grants typically provide enough funding for faculty members to conduct key experiments needed to make proposals more competitive.
Gage said the stimulus-funded projects create new jobs throughout campus, but declined to release a specific number until MSU’s quarterly report is reviewed.
“What we’re trying to do is be completely transparent,” Gage said.
“We don’t want to give a number that hasn’t been reviewed.”
Some faculty members said one benefit of the infusion of federal dollars includes receiving the full amount of money they requested.
“Before the stimulus funding, (federal agencies) normally would cut a general percentage off,” Parameswaran said.
Before the stimulus money, Montgomery said she noticed many of her colleagues didn’t receive their requested amount of funding.
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“There seems to have been more colleagues of mine who have received full funding,” Montgomery said. “It allows you to really hire top-notch scientists. I actually hired a postdoctoral student who had previous experience as a post-doctorate, which means they’re a little more expensive. … Full funding and full periods of funding are critical to (continuing research).”
Despite the new jobs created across the university, some faculty members don’t know the fate of those positions once the stimulus funds run dry.
Parameswaran hired two new researchers specifically for his five-year project. The stimulus money will be used for two of the five years, after which the NIH will step in to help fund the final three years, he said.
“I don’t know how much money at that point (NIH) will have,” Parameswaran said.
“It’s not going to be at the same level as this. … It’s hard to say because it depends on what level of cutting there is going to be. I have to find ways to keep them, but at the same time it’s hard to answer not knowing. Two years is a long time from now.”
