Investing to build biomedical research

Just days into his new job as Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies in September 2004, Ian Gray and then-Provost Lou Anna Simon charged the Science and Technology Subcommittee (STC) of the University Research Council to develop a plan for increasing funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The research associate deans began by examining MSU’s current NIH funding. What they found was a very small number of large collaborative program project and center grants compared to the number of individual-investigator grants. Changing that ratio would have a large impact on increasing overall NIH funding, they concluded. The STC settled on a planning strategy to solicit a series of white papers that would identify research teams and resources needed to compete successfully for NIH center grants of $4-$5 million.

That fall, the research associate deans, led by Justin McCormick, College of Osteopathic Medicine, and Estelle McGroarty, College of Natural Science, gathered groups of researchers to begin identifying MSU’s strengths in the health and biomedical sciences. “What we found,” McCormick recalls, “was that some groups already existed and a few of them were quite mature. They included investigators who had been working together for a while, and they had a number of individual NIH grants.” With a little boost, those groups would be ready almost immediately to apply for a center grant.

Other faculty groups discovered each other during the process, forming new collaborations and looking for ways to link their efforts to pursue center grants.

By December 2004 fifteen multidisciplinary groups had coalesced and drafted white papers summarizing their research activities and plans for growth. With feedback from the associate deans, the groups revised their proposals, and last summer the STC reviewed the final white papers and presentations from each of the groups.

The STC made tentative program funding recommendations to VP Gray and the deans using the following criteria:

“The resource requests fell into three categories,” McGroarty reported. The categories were faculty hires, core facilities that would also benefit other research areas, and program enhancement requests. VP Gray accepted the recommendations and funded ten groups (see sidebar).

“I think the exercise we went through meshed well with the process colleges conducted to request quality funds,” says VP Gray. Provost Kim Wilcox recently announced the funding decisions from the Fund for the Enhancement of Academic Quality. “Some of the new faculty positions identified to support academics will also respond to the needs identified in the health and biomedical research white papers,” Gray notes.

The OVPRGS invested funds in the following groups to develop proposals for NIH centers: