Research funding at Oregon State University has topped $380 million for the fifth straight fiscal year, and research expenditures by the university, a key measure of research output, rose despite the pandemic for the seventh consecutive year, increasing by 5%. Oregon State University – Cascades’ research funding total was $3.4 million, the second highest annual amount in the history of the Bend campus.
The contributions of OSU research extend worldwide, through programs such as real-time ocean monitoring, the development of spatial datasets that reveal short- and long-term climate trends, the national expansion of Oregon State’s TRACE-COVID-19 public health project, and a Physics Frontier Center that seeks to understand the universe through gravitational waves.
“Oregon State University faculty continue to address real-world problems in Oregon, around the United States and across the globe,” said OSU Interim President Becky Johnson. “Despite a pandemic that placed limits on their activities, our scientists found ways to engage in discovery and produce innovative answers to some of the planet’s most important issues, including the ongoing challenge of COVID-19.”
The total funding of $383.9 million for fiscal year 2021, which ended June 30, is the fourth highest in OSU history. Meanwhile, the rise in research expenditures by the university marked the 17th time in the last 19 years that expenditures have shown a year-to-year increase.
OSU–Cascades continues an upward trajectory in research funding at the growing campus, where research dollars totaled $9.3 million over the past three fiscal years, more than double the level from the preceding three fiscal years.
“OSU-Cascades nurtures and attracts expert faculty researchers and talented post-doctoral scholars and graduate students who are inspired to make a difference,” said Andrew Ketsdever, interim vice president of OSU-Cascades. “The increased funding is evidence of the productivity of our researchers and their teams, and their shared commitment to improving Central Oregon, the state, nation and our world.”
OSU-Cascades’ largest research project underway is led by Bahman Abbasi, an assistant professor in the energy systems engineering program and the director of the Water and Energy Technologies Lab. Abbasi designs systems to produce fresh water from salt water and to recover usable water from wastewater that results from hydraulic fracturing. His work has attracted more than $5 million in research awards from the the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust and U.S. Department of Energy in recent years.
In the Energy Systems Lab a team led by Chris Hagen, an associate professor in energy systems engineering, continues its work to investigate hybrid powertrains for small unmanned aircraft systems and to understand the efficiency of a variety of engine fuels. Since founded in 2012, the lab has attracted $3.6 million in funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Oregon Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center, Inc., the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others. It has also produced a spin-off company, On-Board Dynamics.
Another team of researchers is investigating an array of challenges echoed nationally in divisive community conversations. Elizabeth Marino, an associate professor of sociology, and Chris Wolsko, an associate professor of psychology, co-lead the Laboratory for the American Conversation.
Marino and Wolsko received funding from the city of Bend to address how to tailor COVID-19 public health messaging to align with values of different audiences. Marino also received $60,000 from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to work with communities to address cultural and socioeconomic conflicts involving fishing in Oregon’s marine reserves. Additionally, she was awarded $750,000 from the National Science Foundation to investigate issues facing coastal communities exposed to repetitive flooding and the effectiveness of federal disaster response policies.
Through its Northwest Bat Hub, the Human Ecosystem Resilience and Sustainability Lab received awards totaling $1.2 million from the Bureau of Land Management, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. National Park Service for bat population monitoring in the Pacific Northwest, as well as white-nose syndrome surveillance in bats. White-nose syndrome is a disease that has devastated bat populations across the country. One study pursued by the Bat Hub confirmed Central Oregon as a hotspot for spotted bats and determined it could be a place for further study and conservation.
Other research projects underway at the Bend campus include:
- Shannon Lipscomb, an associate professor in the human development and family sciences program, continues to support TRACES Central Oregon, a nonprofit focused on building resilience to trauma. Lipscomb’s research portfolio, which primarily focuses on education, risk and resilience in early childhood, has attracted $2.3 million in funding to date.
- With a $42,000 grant from Portland State University, Brianne Kothari, an assistant professor also in the human development and family sciences program, continues to study recommendations for how child welfare agencies can increase retention of caseworkers.
- Matt Orr, an associate professor of biology continues to investigate the benefits of analog beaver dams in restoring estuaries along the Crooked River with a $39,000 grant from the Oregon Governor’s Watershed Enhancement Board.
OSU-Cascades is collaborating with the OSU Center for the Outdoor Recreation Economy to leverage the expertise of faculty in the outdoor products degree program and experts in the Central Oregon recreation environment. The collaboration will also produce education programs and research for industry.
Each year, the vice president of OSU-Cascades presents the Research and Scholarship Activity Award to a researcher. Professor Christine Pollard, was given the award in 2021 for her 10 years of kinesiology research engaging undergraduate and graduate students, community health partners and the public. Her efforts include the creation of the biomechanics FORCE Lab, where research examines leg and foot injuries, biomechanics associated with the use of various styles of running shoes, and injury-prevention and rehabilitation programs. Pollard now serves as dean of academic affairs at OSU-Cascades.
“As OSU-Cascades expands, our research activity will also grow in its impact and benefit to communities locally and globally,” said Ketsdever.
“Expenditures correlate strongly with research activity and results – they’re monies spent in the lab and the field in pursuit of new knowledge that improves and enriches lives,” said Irem Tumer, OSU vice president for research.
Last year’s funding total generated by OSU researchers was particularly impressive and indicative of the upward trend of Oregon State’s overall research enterprise because it includes only a small amount of money from two large projects – the construction of several research vessels and a wave energy testing facility – that have strengthened OSU’s total research funding since 2017.
Since 2017, those two projects alone have annually brought as much as $77 million to $127 million in research grants to OSU.
OSU’s groundbreaking TRACE-COVID-19 project, which has conducted more than 80,000 individual coronavirus tests and more than 4,000 wastewater tests in dozens of communities around Oregon, received $2 million from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to create a national TRACE Center that expands the project to other states.
The TRACE Center harnesses the power of public health departments, universities and other institutions around the country to help measure the prevalence of the virus that causes COVID-19 by combining community surveillance sampling, wastewater analysis, viral sequence data and mathematical models of SARS-CoV-2 prevalence that OSU TRACE researchers developed.
“We are very proud of the TRACE team’s accomplishments and proud of the many achievements by OSU researchers,” Tumer said. “Oregon State University researchers work along the entire spectrum of scientific endeavor, from targeted applications like TRACE that save lives, to others that promote economic and societal well-being, to curiosity-driven projects that expand our knowledge of how the world and the galaxies work.”
Oregon State is the lead institution for a $17 million National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center that studies the universe through low-frequency ripples in the fabric of time-space. The center, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, uses pulsar timing arrays to listen for choruses of wave signals from multiple super-massive black hole mergers. The goal is to push the boundaries of the understanding of physics and astronomy through the study of black hole mergers, which are many times the mass of the sun.
OSU is also part of a pair of $20 million NSF centers aimed at improving lives by developing artificial intelligence solutions for two of society’s most important challenges: sustaining agricultural production amid diminishing water and labor supplies, weather variations and climate change; and helping people to continue living in their own homes as they develop cognitive impairments associated with aging.
OSU scientists received another $3 million from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to work on controlling blight in carrots, a signature seed crop in the Northwest and a nearly $1 billion U.S. industry.
Oregon State researchers were awarded $2 million to develop new varieties of organic naked barley – the seed can be threshed right from the hull – to be used in a range of dietary ways. Historically, barley has mainly been used as animal feed, but it has an optimal level of beta-glucan, a soluble dietary fiber that lowers cholesterol and aids digestion.
The myriad aspects of climate change continue to be areas of emphasis for OSU scientists, who among other awards received $6 million from the NSF to manage the data transmission cyberinfrastructure of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, an ongoing multi-university coalition that monitors ocean conditions in real time, and an additional $2 million from the NSF to study the pace at which tidewater glaciers are melting.
Oregon State’s total research funding of $449.9 in 2020 included $25 million in research vessel funding from the NSF as well as $52 million from the Department of Energy for the PacWave South energy testing site off the coast of Newport.
Federal funding of $246.4 million accounts for 64% of OSU’s fiscal year 2021 research grants and contracts. Land grant formula funding provided $79 million; nonprofit organizations, including foundations, $13.5 million; state and local governments, $9.7 million; and foreign governments, $458,922.
OSU’s engagement with business and industry totaled $34.7 million –exceeding $30 million for the sixth straight year. Sources include technology licensing, contracts for testing, support through the Agricultural Research Foundation and research gifts through the OSU Foundation. Almost half of the revenues covered costs for technology testing services, which OSU labs do to document the performance of innovative private sector products and services.
One of those innovations this past year was an after-market device for solving a longstanding safety problem in the trucking industry: drivers slipping and falling when getting into or out of their cab. At the request of Daimler Trucks North America, students in OSU’s Prototype Development Lab created a handle to be mounted in the manner of a fence gate under the instrument panel, giving the driver something to hold onto while entering or exiting a tall cab of a freight vehicle.
“Partnerships, innovation and entrepreneurial activity are critical to the success of these projects,” Tumer said. “Continued research investments by industry show Oregon State University’s expanding leadership in fields from agriculture and human health to marine sciences, robotics, business, liberal arts and forestry. Our faculty collaborate with businesses, communities and individuals around the world to solve problems and create new economic opportunities.”
One business enabler is the Oregon State University Advantage Accelerator, which spurs societal and economic impact through the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Specific innovation-based efforts have received funding through the state-authorized University Venture Development Fund, which allows donors to the OSU Foundation to receive a 60% tax credit for contributions. Over the past decade, donors to the foundation have contributed more than $6 million to the fund.
OSU scientists have leveraged the Accelerator Innovation Development Fund, which was created within the UVDF, to investigate the market potential of research-based innovations.
Among the new startup concepts are Pacific Vaccines, which seeks to develop a vaccine for gonorrhea; Oligo Activity Enhancer, which aims to create a new delivery system for cancer drugs; PediaNourish, at work on a device that monitors glucose levels in premature infants and delivers the appropriate level of nutrients and glucose autonomously; and Microbiome Engineering, whose product is a gut/brain chip that serves as a screening tool to rapidly assess the impact of gut microbiota metabolites on issues such as autism, depression and cognition.
Other startups include Tactical Augmented Reality Flashlight, which seeks to create a directional device for first responders’ vehicles that projects turn-by-turn directions on the road, in daylight and at night, and RenewCat, which is trying to develop a line of non-petroleum-derived cleaners with an initial focus on antiseptic wipes.
“Our entrepreneurs are constantly and aggressively driving innovation toward commercialization because of their dedication to maximizing OSU’s impact, and thanks to the assistance of Oregon State’s world-class research capabilities, the University Venture Development Fund and support of the OSU Advantage programs,” said Brian Wall, OSU’s associate vice president for research, innovation and economic impact.
Information about Oregon State’s research centers and institutes is summarized here, and project summaries and FY21 research totals for OSU colleges are also online:
College of Agricultural Sciences: https://agsci.oregonstate.edu/
College of Business: https://business.oregonstate.
College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences: https://ceoas.oregonstate.edu/
College of Education: https://education.oregonstate.
College of Engineering: https://engineering.
College of Forestry: https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/
College of Liberal Arts: https://liberalarts.
College of Pharmacy: https://pharmacy.oregonstate.
College of Public Health and Human Sciences: https://health.oregonstate.
College of Science: https://science.oregonstate.
College of Veterinary Medicine: https://vetmed.oregonstate.
