UB leads SUNY in R&D expenditures

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Contributing Editor

The university ranks among New York State's top colleges and universities—both public and private—when it comes to expenditures for research and development, according to the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR).

UB spends the most on research of any unit in the SUNY system, according to NYSTAR.

With $187,692,000 in research and development expenditures in 1999-2000, UB ranks fourth behind Cornell and Columbia universities and the University of Rochester, and ahead of Stony Brook and Albany, which rank sixth and 10th, respectively.

Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi said UB's ranking "reflects the quality and hard work of our faculty."

"Research grants are highly competitive," she added, "and that UB does so well attests to the excellence of our science and the dedication of our faculty in competing at the highest levels."

NYSTAR based its ranking on a report released recently by the National Science Foundation on academic research-and-development spending nationwide.

Total amounts for each institution included federal, state and local funding, as well as institution funds, including institutionally financed research and unreimbursed indirect costs and related sponsored research.

"There is a significant amount of critical research and development being done in New York," said Russell W. Bessette, executive director of NYSTAR. "Innovations made on campus today eventually will turn into job-creating technologies of tomorrow."

Major developments at UB during the past year have emphasized these kinds of job-creating technologies. Just last month, Gov. George Pataki announced that the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, in which UB is the lead academic partner, would go forward with $50 million in state funding and $150 million in private-sector funding. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Thomas Reynolds recently announced $3.1 million in federal funds to support the center's start-up costs.

Last spring, Pataki also announced not only the return to Buffalo of a Center for Advanced Technology—a partnership between UB and Roswell Park Cancer Institute—but also a total of $25 million in NYSTAR funds for three projects. The most substantial of those was $15.3 million allocated for the establishment by UB, RPCI, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute and Kaleida Health of the new Strategically Targeted Academic Research (STAR) Center for Disease Modeling and Therapy Discovery.

An additional $8 million in NYSTAR funding was awarded to UB's Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, part of a $14 million information technology research center awarded to the Rochester Institute of Technology, while researchers at UB's Industry/University Center on Biosurfaces also received funding proposed at $1.5 million as part of the New York Environmental Quality Systems Center established at Syracuse University.

UB also significantly bolstered its efforts in technology transfer and economic development with the creation this past summer of a new Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach, headed by Robert J. Genco, vice provost, SUNY Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Oral Biology in the School of Dental Medicine.