Once again the Amherst campus has done an impressive job of securing funding for groundbreaking projects and research. Though the number and dollar amount requested in proposals decreased slightly between FY '04 and FY'05, our faculty and staff have presented strong, relevant cases for external funding resulting in a 3% increase in awards last year, contributing to a 6% increase in the 3 year rolling average.

Awards

Table 7 shows that several Colleges achieved an increase in the amount of award funding over FY'04. The College of Engineering, the College of Natural Resources and the Environment, and the School of Education demonstrate a steady upward trend over the last 5 years and can report a 26%, 38%, and 66% increase respectively. The School of Nursing doubled its' number of awards to reflect a remarkable 250% dollar increase over FY'04.

Distribution of Award Dollars

It is rewarding to note that, as can be seen on Figures 5 and 6, we are receiving fewer small awards and those awards are going to fewer PIs. We are down from 467 awards under $50K representing 37% of the PIs receiving awards in FY 1999 to 371 awards of that size for 25% of the PIs in FY 2005. This indicates that more PI's are receiving a larger proportion of the award dollars at the higher award sizes. This has a positive impact on the institution by requiring less processing and overhead per award dollar received. Similarly, it indicates that a greater number of Investigators are winning larger awards. The percent of PIs represented in each award size category is fairly level across the graph in FY 2005 and the percent of award dollars in the largest size category is higher than it has ever been since we began tracking this attribute. The variation between size categories was much greater and the percent of award dollars in the highest category was almost 20% less in FY 1999.

Sources of Funding

The Federal government remains our largest funding source having brought in 65% of the total award dollars in FY 2005. Though the amount of Federal funding was 8% less than in the previous year, other sponsor types made up the difference. State and Local Government funding increased 340% over FY '04, possibly because the federal pass-through funds in this category comprised 16% of the total funding. There has been a trend toward more federal pass-through awards in Industry as well.   Industry sponsors contributed 100% more than last year and 8.3% of those dollars were of Federal origin. Commonwealth of Massachusetts funding also increased 45%, helping to keep our numbers up despite the Federal slowdown, putting State funds at over 12% of the total awards in FY 2005.

Cooperative Projects

The campus initiative to foster more interdisciplinary projects is bearing fruit. At the start of FY 2004, the campus began capturing data regarding the percent of credit for each Investigator on an award. The continuing projects were assumed at an equal split because of the difficulty involved in back-filling that information. A comparison of FY '04 and FY '05 Co-Investigator data indicates that there were 46% more dollars awarded to projects with Co-Investigators from other departments in FY '05 than in FY '04. It is also encouraging that although there were only 12% more projects involving co-investigators from other disciplines in FY '05, the number of different co-investigators in those projects increased by 19% over FY '04. The dollar amount that those multidisciplinary projects, expressed as a percent of the total, represents a 6% increase over FY '04 for 21% of the total amount awarded in FY '05.

In summary, it is clear that the faculty and staff at UMass Amherst are working hard and being very successful in pursuing significant funding from various sources, adjusting to the re-distribution of available dollars in the sponsor sector, and teaming together to secure more numerous larger awards.

Carol Sprague
Office of Grant & Contract Administration