NSF Research Dollars to UMass Amherst Top $14.6 Million for Last Quarter of FY10
July 13, 2010
| Contact: | Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444 |
AMHERST, Mass. – As one of the leading research institutions in the state, the University of Massachusetts Amherst continues to attract impressive amounts of federal research funding. For example, in the last quarter of FY10, the campus accepted 75 awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a total of $14,668,990.
Year-end figures show the campus closed its fiscal year with a record amount of sponsored research, securing 498 total federal awards worth $129,262,137 during the fiscal year, which is 38 percent higher than last year, a new record. Almost $39 million of this was one-time stimulus money, according to Michael Malone, vice chancellor for research and engagement.
Malone says the campus’s strong performance reflects UMass Amherst’s increasing success in landing competitive research dollars to fund top-quality studies, attract the most outstanding students and provide a world-class educational experience.
“Winners will be students and research faculty and ultimately the American public,” says Malone, “I’m pleased that at a time when the state is struggling because of the economy to support higher education, students who come to our campus will have access to excellence in research experiences thanks to strong federal support.” Of the overall 498 grants to UMass Amherst, 231 of them, worth more than $54.4 million, came from NSF.
Funds from NSF will support studies in widely varied areas from how to provide secure computer transactions and individual privacy in transit systems and computer networks to the history of the Earth’s crust and impacts of the community-supported agriculture movement.
One of the largest single awards is $844,997 to electrical and computer engineer Wayne Burleson and colleagues in computer science and transportation engineering at UMass Amherst, UMass Dartmouth and Brown University. The researchers say that as governments move into the digital age and adopt “pay as you go” fee collection for toll roads and parking, the security of credit cards and accounts are concerns. Their three-year, $1.17 million “Pay-as-you-Go: Security and Privacy for Integrated Transportation Payment Systems (ITPS)” study will identify the most efficient, low-cost and reliable ways to provide secure, private and trusted transactions.
Burleson explains, “While a large body of research exists in the area of secure payments, applying this to transportation systems is challenging because of security and privacy requirements and the need to keep costs low.” Public acceptance is central to successful deployment of such systems and experience shows this is directly linked to consumers’ trust in system privacy, security and safety, he adds. The team hopes to show that their approach offers adequate privacy at a low cost while also allowing operators to collect the data necessary to improve transportation systems.
Another large NSF grant, $873,125, also related to cybersecurity, was given to computer scientist Gerome Miklau and colleagues, who will use synthetic networks to study ways to allow statistical analysis and knowledge discovery on networks without violating the privacy of participating individuals. “Network data sets record the structure of computer, communication, social or organizational networks, but they often contain highly sensitive information about individuals,” they point out. At the same time, various managers want access to network data for analysis, modeling and other functions.
Other grants announced recently will support undergraduate and graduate student studies and events such as the Fourth Northeast Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence. An award of $598,376 will provide mentoring and support to a diverse group of 18 community college transfer students to achieve their “next level of academic success” in computer sciences and engineering in annual scholarships of $8,000 each.
Doctoral studies include one exploring whether practices such as non-market pricing, volunteerism and the exchange/barter system used by farm workers/consumers in community-supported agriculture carry over into other parts of life. A biology study of green anole lizards will examine how signals and functional traits interact to determine the creature’s survival and reproduction by observation, experiments and genetic tests. Flowering plant defenses are the topic of another dissertation looking at nectar robbers and florivores, that is, insects that eat or destroy flowers.
Other NSF grants awarded during the period to UMass Amherst researchers will support:
• Folding mobile communication technologies plus social networking software and websites into the biology curricula of several courses to take full advantage of students’ proficiency with networked communication, while introducing them to field observations and research skills.
• Studying the way peoples’ feelings and their context influence thoughts, judgments and behavior, in particular how information processing styles affect happiness and sadness. This social psychology research will focus on three domains: the self, impression formation and perceptions of groups.
• Creating organizationally adept software agents for networked computer systems which could be useful in health care and sustainable energy.
• Studying detailed function of the four pairs of specialized eyes in jumping spiders and how the animals integrate information from each pair.
• Direct knowledge of how hot the Earth can be, based on the record of melting and crystallization locked in well-preserved rocks on the Labrador coast, where magma intruded into the crust from the mantle 1.3-billion years ago.
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