Research support from external sources reached a record level at UC Santa Barbara during the last fiscal year, when a total of $176 million was received from federal and state agencies, corporations, and foundations, an increase of 11 percent or $17 million over the previous year.
Funding in the form of contracts and grants for research, training, and public service programs is considered the lifeblood of a premier research university.
Over the past decade, UCSB's external research support has doubled.
"This extraordinary achievement in research funding is a testament to the outstanding quality and enormous impact of the broad spectrum of scholarly and creative activities under way at UC Santa Barbara," said UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang.
"External research funding is absolutely essential to our faculty, researchers, and students who are conducting groundbreaking research."
In the fiscal year ending June 30, UCSB received large research grants in the sciences and engineering as well as in the humanities and social sciences.
"When looking at the details of these increases in funding, the most striking feature is how broadly they are distributed across many academic disciplines," said Michael Witherell, UCSB vice chancellor for research.
"This success in attracting research funding comes about because of the stature of UCSB researchers and the quality of their scholarship."
Since 1987, federal spending for research in science and engineering has more than doubled.
During the same time period, UC Santa Barbara's overall research funding has quadrupled.
"UCSB researchers have gotten steadily better in competing for federal research dollars," Witherell noted.
During 2006-07, support from federal agencies amounted to $121.3 million, or nearly 70 percent of UCSB's total research funding.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) was the largest single source, as it has been for more than a decade.
Included in the NSF total was renewed funding for the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Each of the national research centers will receive $4 million annually over the next five years.
The second largest funding source for UCSB research was the Department of Defense for unclassified research, followed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Research funds from private foundations and corporations increased significantly last year.
Foundation support rose by 40 percent to $28 million. Corporate support for campus projects totaled $11.6 million, an increase of 33 percent.
The UC System provided $11.2 million, and the State of California and local government added $3.7 million.
Among the many grants received was $564,000 from the NSF for research on how to retain undergraduate women in science majors.
The study will examine social interaction in formal and informal educational contexts among undergraduate majors in physics, chemistry, and mathematics to determine what sorts of interactions are most effective in developing identities as scientists.
UCSB's success in attracting research funding beyond the fields of science and engineering is demonstrated by grants in the humanities and social sciences, including these:
--$520,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to examine people's understanding of credibility across the wide range of digital information resources that exist today, including how socioeconomic and demographic characteristics affect usage behaviors and credibility assessments.
--$325,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish the English Ballad Archive, a collection of English broadside ballads posted on the Internet in their original format.
The ballads, which number in the thousands and date back to the 16th century, are rhymed accounts of sensational news events that satisfied the public's hunger for news and gossip in much the same way tabloid magazines and newspapers do today.
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