Research

Catalyzing Research

Indiana University received a record $680.2 million in external funding to support research and other activities in fiscal year 2019. IU’s record funding amount is the highest total of such funding for any university in Indiana during the last fiscal year, and it has increased nearly 45% since FY 2009. President McRobbie remarked: “It reflects the excellence and importance of IU faculty research in a funding environment that continues to grow increasingly competitive. It also is testament to the thousands of IU faculty, staff, and students who form the teams that develop the university’s high-quality research proposals and whose ideas and work are being favorably judged by their peers around the nation and world at a time when only the most promising research proposals are securing support.”

Around 66% of all of IU’s research funding originated from federal sources in FY 2019. The $680.2 million includes a record $378.1 million in federal grants and contracts, $53.6 million in awards from the National Science Foundation, and nearly $68 million in sponsored funding from industry. It includes a total of $208.3 million in nongovernmental grants, which is also an IU record. IU set a new university record with $234.9 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the major federal government source of support for health sciences research in the United States. Much of the record total is funding medical research at the IU School of Medicine. IU’s largest single grant from the NIH, a grant of $44.7 million, is supporting an IU-led, five-year national study of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

The Bicentennial Strategic Plan presented as an action item: “IU will ask faculty and academic leadership to identify the grand challenges to which IU can contribute most effectively, building on strengths in the humanities, professions, and social, natural, and clinical sciences. IU will support multidisciplinary and multicampus teams to address those grand challenges.” Since the announcement of the action item, IU has established three Grand Challenges:

Launched in 2016, and IU’s first Grand Challenge, the Precision Health Initiative (PHI) has made important, life-changing progress in helping patients. PHI research teams are discovering new ways to personalize care and improve outcomes as they pursue ambitious goals in five disease areas: Alzheimer’s disease, multiple myeloma (a blood cancer), pediatric sarcomas (a childhood cancer characterized by tumors in nerves, muscles, or bones), type 2 diabetes, and triple negative breast cancer. IU has recruited 124 new faculty members through the PHI Grand Challenge, and has secured $26 million in grant funding. Previously unavailable precision genomics clinics have been expanded across the state, allowing doctors to tailor treatments based on DNA or genetics, and the first CAR-T cell therapies, which re-engineer a patient’s T-cells to kill cancerous cells, have been administered to adult cancer patients in Indiana.

Established in 2017, IU’s second Grand Challenge, Prepared for Environmental Change, is delivering actionable solutions to address issues created by our world’s changing climate. The work of the Prepared for Environmental Change initiative is facilitated through the Environmental Resilience Institute, which brings leading researchers together with government, business, nonprofit, and community leaders to help them plan and prepare in the face of challenges to our communities, economy, health, and livelihoods. The team has partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency to launch the Environmental Resilience Institute Toolkit, a digital resource providing data, research, and case studies to help Midwestern communities reduce the consequences of environmental change.

IU’s third Grand Challenge, Responding to the Addictions Crisis, was launched in late 2017. The initiative engages a broad array of IU’s world-class faculty as well as business, nonprofit, and government partners. Working together, these partners are implementing a comprehensive plan to reduce deaths from addiction, ease the burden of drug addiction on Hoosier communities, and improve health and economic outcomes. This initiative is one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive state-based responses to the opioid addiction crisis—and the largest led by a university.

New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities continues to be a one-of-a-kind university investment in creative and scholarly activity of IU faculty. From 2015 to 2019, 260 grants were awarded to faculty members on every IU campus. Award funds for the same time period totaled slightly more than $5 million. Neil Goodman, professor of fine arts at IU Northwest and a 2016 New Frontiers recipient, said: “It is a great program. This grant is very important as it gives faculty the opportunity to explore directions in their work that would be impossible without support. As with much creative research, the seeds of exploration continue to develop and grow. This grant has made that possible.”

Students and instructor conducting research in a forest