Newswise — Despite a slow economy and tight overall federal funds for research, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) has reported a one-year, 10 percent increase in outside research funding, extending its strong research and development surge of more than a decade.
In Fiscal Year 2008, which ended June 30, the University reached $450 million in funding awarded to campus researchers.
Long-known for both its research and education—the raw material of industry—the University before this year had already increased its research base from $138 million in 1997 to $411 million in 2007. The R&D surge places UMB among the top public academic medical centers in the country for research dollars.
Research grants from the National Institutes of Health to UMB in the fiscal year rose by 8 percent to $164 million. Catholic Relief Services and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded two-thirds of the nearly $75 million received from foundations, which is double the level of support from FY 2007. Hundreds of corporate-sponsored projects eclipsed prior year funding levels by 44 percent.
"The growth in funds is translating into new jobs on our campus"•that's people who live, work, and spend their money here, which generates financial activity to the economy of the state," says UMB President David J. Ramsay, DM, DPhil. The University is an economic engine that returns more than $16 in financial activity for every $1 invested in it by the state.
While the University continues to shape tomorrow's policies by educating the next generation of dentists, lawyers, nurses, pharmacists, physicians, social workers, and scientists, faculty research is yielding a growing number of discoveries that are being patented and licensed by UMB's Office of Research and Development to corporations for commercial development. As a result, the University spins out a rich diversity of new technology. At any one time, more than 100 patented technologies from the University are available to entrepreneurs for licensing.
Inventions by UMB scientists reached an all-time annual high of 114 in 2007. The University has launched more than 30 new businesses from ideas that emerged from its research.
"Collaboration is what drives much of the work at UMB and collaboration in every sense remains essential to our success," says Ramsay.
"For example, at our BioPark, high-tech offices and laboratories offer a fast track for new and established Maryland businesses in many industries, not just medicine, to reach patients around the world," says Ramsay. Located in Baltimore's downtown business district, the University of Maryland BioPark is destined to be one of the best research parks in the world, according to the Association of University Research Parks. Last year, the group named the BioPark as its "Emerging University Research Science Park of the Year.
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