Win Phillips: UF jumps in R&D ranks

November 2, 2007

This op-ed appeared Nov. 2 in The Gainesville Sun.

By: Win Phillips
Win Phillips is vice president for Research at the University of Florida.

Buried in a recent National Science Foundation report is an eye-opening piece of news: The University of Florida has jumped 10 spots among top academic research institutions in research and development spending.

Continue to 2nd paragraph UF, which spent $565 million on R&D last fiscal year, currently ranks 17th among the nation’s major universities – up from 27th just two years ago. UF now outranks the University of California at Berkeley, which spent $546 million, and has edged closer to such well-known institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which spent $601 million, and Duke University, with $657 million, according to the report by the NSF’s Division of Science Resources Statistics.

UF’s success is hardly a surprise: Our research enterprise has grown consistently for many years. But our rise comes at a time when federal support for research, the nation’s largest single source of research dollars, is hitting the brakes. Federal spending on academic research rose just 2.9 percent last year, yet federal dollars flowing to UF increased 11 percent.

We are bucking the trend, and not just for federal support. According to NSF, state and local research and development expenditures didn’t even outpace inflation. Yet UF’s state funding soared from $48.6 million two years ago to $93.4 million last year, an amazing 92 percent increase.

The good news is tied to three major developments.

One, our excellent faculty increasingly win not only large grants from government and private research institutions, but also prestigious ones.

Last year, UF faculty members for the first time scored two grants from one of the nation’s best known medical research institutions’ the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And we became the only university in Florida to land two new state Centers of Excellence; the Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Center for Bio-Nano Sensors.

Second, our research infrastructure – our labs, clean rooms and technological equipment – is reaching a new level of competitiveness with our peers. Although scientists began moving in as long as 18 months ago, we officially opened the largest research building on this campus, the 280,000-square-foot Cancer and Genetics Research Complex, about a year ago. Its opening comes on the heels of other recently completed state-of-the-art research facilities, including the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.

Indeed, UF is undergoing something of a building renaissance. President Machen has emphasized an interdisciplinary building program, and we now have more than $750 million in facilities planned and funded. Major current research building projects include the Biomedical Sciences Building and the Nanoscale Research Facility. When these and other projects are complete, we will have added more than a half million square feet of research space to our campus.

Third, our technology transfer and commercialization efforts have scored. In the increasingly synergistic world of public-private research and development, being good at moving research from the lab to the marketplace is important.

In May, Business Week compared UF to MIT and the California Institute of Technology, noting that Florida’s license income jumped from $11 million 10 years ago to $40.3 million today. The Milken Institute has ranked UF fifth nationwide on its University Technology Transfer and Commercialization Index. And our biotechnology incubator was named second this year in the technology category by the National Business Incubation Association.

Much has been made of Florida’s current budget woes. But support for our research endeavors continues to grow, and UF’s technology commercialization business is flourishing, even in this challenging budgetary environment.