Kansas University on Tuesday reported good news and bad news about research funding.

In the past four years externally sponsored research expenditures at all KU campuses totaled more than $1 billion, the strongest four-year span ever for the school.

However, in the face of the continuing federal budget sequester — and a decade of declining purchasing power for federally funded research — KU’s research expenditures from all sources fell during fiscal year 2014, the university said. Spending from externally sponsored grants totaled $238.8 million last year, compared with $260.5 million in 2013 and $275.2 million in 2012, which KU noted was the high point for supplemental research spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

KU is not facing the downward trend alone.

“Other universities are experiencing the same pressures we are,” Mary Lee Hummert, KU interim vice chancellor for research, said in a news release. “KU’s strong focus at both campuses on human health and development attracts support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Education. About half our research funding comes from those agencies, so flat or falling levels of support hit KU especially hard.”

The success rate for NIH proposals now ranges from about 1 in 10 to about 1 in 4, depending on the institute, Hummert said.

That has KU looking more to other funding sources.

Richard Barohn, vice chancellor for research at KU Medical Center, said that even with the decline in NIH dollars new opportunities are arising for health-related research funding.

“For example, we’ve had success obtaining funding in the past year from the nonprofit Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute,” Barohn said in a news release. “So while some resources are diminishing, others are opening up. We have to be flexible and adapt to a changing environment.”

KU reports that it currently receives about 85 percent of its research support from the federal government.

Hummert said advocacy in Washington was important, too, and that federal partnerships with research universities strengthen the nation’s health and global competitiveness.

In the past year the Science Coalition, a national advocacy organization, has recognized both U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran and U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder. Moran received a Champion of Science Award in 2014, and Yoder is featured in a video on the Coalition website.

KU research initiatives

Along with new research spending numbers, KU on Tuesday reported the following “research highlights.”

• Creation of Frontiers: The Heartland Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at KU Medical Center, offering faster patient access to the benefits of health research.

• Development of a national center in the Life Span Institute to help schools enact a KU model for improving academic outcomes for general and special education students.

• Fulfillment of a National Endowment for the Humanities challenge grant that leveraged $1.3 million in private gifts to promote collaborative faculty research projects in the humanities.

Source: KU