$1 Billion Dollars

 Mark Emmert, the president of the University of Washington, just sent around an internal email: last year the university received more than $1 billion dollars in funding from federal and other sources (about 80% of it was federal).

That is a lot of grant funding! I’d heard that UW had the largest grant funding of all public universities in the USA. What I didn’t realize was, first, we’ve done that since 1974. And in since 1969 we’ve been top 5 for all universities — and recently only Johns Hopkins beats us. Ok — now this seems like a truly phenomenal amount of money! It is kind-a fun realizing that the grant money our group brings in goes towards that. Of course, it is a piddly amount. I think the way you get to $1 billion is by having lots of centers funded to the tune of 50 million a year each or similar sized projects.

Last I heard (and this was before the NIH changed its funding profile) this was something like 70% medical grants and 30% natural sciences. I doubt it will have changed much given that federal funding has been flat since those days. We sciences have some catching up to do!

This also explains why we get audited so much!

Now, if only the university had money to hire more professors! 🙂