More money than ever is on the way to the students and faculty of Ball State University to make numerous education and research projects possible, the university recently announced.
The university received $25.7 million throughout 2004 and 2005 -- nearly quadrupled from what it was a decade ago and almost $600,000 more than last year, according to the office of academic research and sponsored programs at Ball State.
James Pyle, assistant vice president for research, said that the credit goes to the faculty and staff, and it was the quality of their work that brought so much money to various departments on campus.
All of this money coming from outside sources will allow staff and students to work on projects that could lead to new discoveries and many new ideas, President Jo Ann Gora said in a prepared statement.
Gora went on to say that the Human Performance Lab has received several grants to allow faculty to work with NASA and that the newly created Center for Computational Nanoscience just received $1.2 million that will be used to work with nanotechnology, which has brought in some other funding from the Department of Energy.
Some of this funding from the department will be used by Feng Jin, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, to do research on lighting and ways to make the quality of light better while using less energy.
"This is a new area for us to be looking at energy and conservation of it," Pyle said.
All of this new funding is a good thing, he said, but the success rate of programs is more of a good news-bad news scenario.
The good news is that the faculty who write the proposals for grants are doing an excellent job, showing the amount of planning and reaching out to other business and community groups that the faculty has done in order to get these grants, Pyle said.
"The bad is that we tend to be a little conservative, and when we know something will be competitive, we sometimes shy away from it, and we could be losing some opportunities," he said.
Gora also said that all this funding will allow undergraduate and graduate students the chance to work on research projects one-on-one with faculty and to even do their own research for presentations at various conferences.
Of the university's seven colleges, the College of Science and Humanities got the most money, receiving $5.5 million for 79 projects, and Teachers College received about $5.2 million. Only five grants of the approved 252 were more than $1 million; most grants were for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, according the academic research office.
"This is not a competition. The science departments and Teachers College have the most faculty and most opportunity," Pyle said.
The smaller grants will still allow faculty and students in a variety of departments to do useful work, and they will be important to the administration, to Muncie and to all of Indiana, he said, because those grants are sometimes used to get software, support a student through higher student wages or allow a faculty member to go do a detailed study somewhere.
Despite the fact that the amount of money received this year is the highest amount ever received, Pyle said there isn't any reason why the university couldn't get $30 million within the next couple of years.
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