Jeff Miller / UW-Madison
Gulbrandsen: 'It is harder and harder for younger researchers to qualify for federal grants.'
University of Wisconsin researchers are laying the groundwork to make it possible to "print" new transplant-ready organs, grown from cells cultured from a patient's blood sample. This project, which merges research in biotechnology and nanotechnology, is under way today thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Over at the Wisconsin Energy Institute, scientists are developing improvements to the electrical distribution grid that will seamlessly integrate renewable and traditional energy sources. The research is being done thanks to Department of Energy funding for the Power Systems Engineering Research Center.
Just a short walk over to the chemistry department, researchers are addressing the threat that strains of harmful bacteria present as they become increasingly antibiotic-resistant. What they are learning may become a next-generation line of defense against serious infections. This promising research is also being funded by the NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
But ongoing federal research funding cuts could turn the lights off in these university labs. The jeopardy is real because of the Budget Control Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2011.
Across-the-board federal spending cuts known as budget sequestration took effect March 1, 2013, and slashed 5%, or $1.55 billion, of the annual NIH budget alone. The NIH is the primary federal agency charged with conducting and supporting biomedical and behavioral research.
Similar cuts affected other funding agencies, and ongoing reductions of as-of-yet-unknown and varying amounts are targeted for budgets through 2023. Approximately 640 fewer competitive NIH research project grants were issued in 2013 to universities, medical schools and other research institutions across the nation as a result, and UW-Madison has taken its share of the pounding. In 2009-10 the campus received $798 million in federal research awards. In 2012-13 that amount had shrunk to $620.4 million.
"There is a definite change in research funding," says Michael Corradini, director of the Wisconsin Energy Institute. "There is still opportunity, but it requires more proposals and a lot of discussion on the phone, even visiting Washington to get the funding to start or continue your research program. Success divided by all your attempts is low."
Supporting graduate education
Research expenditures at UW-Madison total more than $1 billion annually. The money is spread throughout the campus. In addition to funding individual research projects, it supports some core research facilities that bring together expensive technology, like high-end imaging microscopes and clean-room facilities that would be outside the reach of any individual lab. "It's an efficient way to provide expertise and equipment to many research teams without having to duplicate," says Marsha Mailick, vice chancellor for research and graduate education.
"Research extends beyond the sciences," says Mailick. "It includes scholarship in the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences, biological and physical sciences. And while the funding streams for each area are different, the growing difficulty over securing funding is a shared concern."
The biological sciences rely heavily on funding from the NIH and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Physical sciences rely on the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies such as the departments of Defense and Energy. Many social sciences rely on federal dollars from the Department of Education, NIH and the National Science Foundation. Some of the social sciences and humanities have less access to large federal granting programs.
"Because of the sequester, all of those federal agencies have lowered their funding levels enormously," says Mailick. "The biggest impact of the sequester comes in areas where there was the greatest success in federal funding in the past, and this is now creating the greatest gap in the capacity of this university to conduct research."
Mailick is worried about how cuts today will diminish not just the university, but the wider community. "This affects so many areas of our society and so many things we all care about.
"We have the Internet today because of research done several decades ago. We have federal policies about water quality and air pollution because of studies that were done here and elsewhere that led to our understanding of how to preserve our natural resources. We have diseases in the history books like polio that no longer threaten our communities.
"We have a great deal to learn about disorders such as autism. We need to understand healthy aging so we can look to our later years in good health," says Mailick. "Underlying all of these questions is the need to support research."
Much of the campus research budget goes into supporting graduate education. It's a win-win combination, says Mailick. "A great part of the tradition of this university is the linkage between graduate education and research. Grad students carry out research under the guidance of experienced investigators, which provides training for them as they make valuable contributions to the research process."
The Biotechnology Training Program directed by Brian Fox is a good example of graduate-powered research at UW-Madison. Funded for the most part by an NIH grant, the program supports 30 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers working with a team of faculty members conducting research in overlapping areas including chemistry, biology, computational sciences and chemical and electrical engineering.
"It gives students exposure to a broader group of faculty and provides support for collaborative research across disciplines," says Fox, a biochemistry professor and interim associate vice chancellor for research policy. "Our students come from all across campus, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, engineering, Letters and Sciences and the medical school all interacting together."
Fox says that many biotechnology questions being asked today require an interdisciplinary approach, bringing chemistry and biology, structural biology, cell biology, engineering and computational skills all to bear. "Every student we support must do an internship with a biotech company as part of their training," he adds, noting that students have been placed with Promega, Invitrogen, Stratotech and a number of local start-ups as well as companies around the country. "It's a chance to experience a new environment and work on a topic of interest to their sponsor, forming links between our students and their potential employers."
Flat funding
Fox arrived at UW-Madison in 1993, when funding opportunities were also tight at the NIH. Things got a little easier when President Bill Clinton approved an increase in the agency's budget. Its appropriation from Congress grew from $15.6 billion in 1999 to $27.2 billion in 2003. (The current appropriation is just over $30 billion.)
Fox's training program is about 25 years old and supports 30 students. Even with all his experience and funding success, there'll be a new roll of the dice for future funding of the program that has been preparing top-flight young researchers for a quarter of a century. "This grant, with direct costs (not including the use of existing UW-Madison facilities) of about $1 million per year, is up for a competitive renewal right now," says Fox. "We are hoping its funding will be renewed."
Helen Blackwell, a UW-Madison chemistry professor, is also facing uncertainties.
"Funding has been a struggle," says Blackwell, who heads a lab of 10 researchers exploring the way bacteria communicate. She came to Madison in 2002. "Funding has been flat and going downhill since then, and in the past five years it has gotten worse. There are so many highly qualified people applying, and there is just not enough federal money to support research. It's almost like a lottery."
The odds get even steeper for younger investigators. The NIH defines young investigators as those in the first seven years of an independent academic position or up until the time they get their first significant funding.
Every investigator on the faculty at UW-Madison is expected to be pretty self-sufficient. They are given a start-up package of a couple hundred thousand dollars to get their labs up and running and are expected to write competitive funding proposals right out of the gate. That process is a lot harder than it used to be. The average age at which a scientist receives a first significant grant is 42. That has increased by five or six years over the past several decades.
Randy Ashton joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering three years ago. With a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, his focus is on how materials interface with living cells, and he wants to develop novel materials that can tell the cells what to do. Specializing in the nervous system, Ashton has been able to grow increasingly complex tissue structures. His goal is to combine 3D biodegradable scaffolds and the signaling material within stem cells to build specific tissues to treat issues like spinal cord injuries.
"The field is moving slowly but steadily," Ashton says. "We can now take skin cells from patients and genetically revert them back to an embryonic-like state. Using a patient's own cells will help with rejection."
While Ashton feels he has been thoroughly trained in the scientific and engineering principles needed to carry out this work, he finds himself less skilled in the business side of research. "Getting funding -- that's the model we are not trained in," he says. "On top of the research and teaching, you have to essentially form a small business to run your lab that produces research and gets grants."
Ashton describes the process that most new faculty members and researchers face. "We start out with small intramural grants from the university to get used to writing grant proposals and submitting them. In terms of larger grants at the national level -- that takes time. Once you put in a grant, it can take six to nine months to hear back."
After what is often an intense, painstaking grant-writing process, the rule of thumb is that one in 10 grant applications gets funded.
"It's a tough process, and it's getting tougher," says Ashton. "The grants are submitted to a review committee and ranked. If you are in the top 10%, you are likely to get funded. When my predecessors were coming through, if you were ranked in the 20th to 30th percentile, you got funded. It's not uncommon for people to have to close their labs after a few years of progress because they couldn't find further funding."
Graduate students hoping to progress to faculty positions of their own and then spend the rest of their working life exploring their research passions are well aware of how the odds of success are shifting.
"It's getting more and more difficult, I think, for us as students to pursue a career in academic science," says PhD candidate Ty Harkness. "We are seeing fellow grad students have their funding dry up as well as established professors in my department. In some cases researchers are losing funding and having to shut down their labs.
In the middle of his Ph.D. research in muscular-skeletal imaging, Rajeev Chaudhary's funding ended. "It was, 'Sorry, we ran out,'" he says. "One of my advisers and I wrote another grant application, and it got a really high score but didn't get funded."
"It was a big shock," he says. "You are always teetering on this line -- should I go get a job where I will get paid, or try to make it in academic research where the funding is dangerously low? You work really long hours in graduate school, and you watch your peers with an undergraduate degree working 9 to 5 in industry and making good money. But in a research lab you learn a lot more about how things work because you are allowed to make mistakes and figure them out, and that's what I wanted to do."
Chaudhary got lucky. At the eleventh hour he was picked up by a surgeon who needed someone to do imaging of muscular tissue and had some startup funds to support a student, but that funding will run out in August, leaving him four and a half years into his Ph.D. research. Five years is about average to refine research techniques and write a thesis in Chaudhary's field.
"Grad school is a marathon, not a sprint," he says. "I'm at that 15-mile mark where you are wiped. I'm hoping to get my wind up again, but sometimes you are just dealt a crappy hand."
WARF to the rescue
Still, the situation here is not as grim as it is at some other public research institutions. Young investigators facing discouraging odds at UW-Madison have two sets of allies: The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and a team in Washington, D.C., that includes Congressman Mark Pocan, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Ben Miller, the UW's director of federal relations.
This fall Pocan came to campus to meet with young investigators and to announce a bill he introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives called the Next Generation Research Act. Meanwhile, Baldwin introduced a companion bill in the Senate. The legislation they propose would create an office in the NIH to expand grant opportunities for young scientists.
"Globally, there is more competition for research funding than in the past," Pocan says. "And at the same time, the sequester cut a billion and a half from research that formerly went to help fund new innovations in science.
"When you cut funds to NIH, some of the newest researchers with the freshest ideas and a new set of eyes are the first to get cut. They have to go into other fields and put their scientific experience and talent elsewhere," Pocan adds. He says his bill will "make sure new researchers aren't leaving the building -- that there will be funds available for them."
What chance does legislation like this have? Miller says it's hard to predict. "All major research universities across the country are struggling with what we call the innovation deficit," he says. "We're facing budget cuts and a level of uncertainty when it comes to the research enterprise. All of us are frustrated with Congress' struggle to pass appropriation bills.
"Week to week, there is no certainty as to what the level of funding will be for NIH as well as agency priorities and agency directions," Miller adds. "The National Science Foundation is due for reauthorization. That will be a really important bill in the next Congress. Our graduate education and research are linked, and federal support in both of those areas is critical to our future."
Fortunately, UW-Madison has a funding source that many campuses do not. Fueled by patents from 88 years of university research and investment of the proceeds, WARF manages its $2.6 billion endowment in a cycle of investment, research and innovation. This cycle helps keep the university competitive. This year WARF will provide about $72 million to the university. About half of the WARF pie goes to the grad school and its programs.
"You can't operate a university today without great grad students," says Carl Gulbrandsen, WARF's managing director. "Some of the WARF fellowships pay multi-year grants to high-quality grad students who are chosen by a research committee made up of faculty.
"Federal dollars are more and more constrained. Wisconsin has still been pretty successful in getting grants, but it is harder and harder for younger researchers to qualify for federal grants, and funding young researchers who are trying to get to the point where they will be awarded federal grants is very expensive for a university."
With so much on the line for the many promising areas of research at UW-Madison, it is particularly frustrating for new faculty and postdoctoral researchers as they consider their academic prospects. And without the healthy injection of new ideas they bring to the university, graduate and undergraduates students alike will also suffer.
Krishanu Saha, assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, is exploring the way DNA is packaged in the nuclei of cells and how that can be manipulated to someday make replacement organs from the patient's own cells. UW-Madison is currently a world leader in this effort.
Saha has won an NSF career award, but that only supports one grad student. Tight funding means that designing experiments, reading papers and thinking through the details of engineering or scientific problems has to wait while Saha and his colleagues pour time and effort into figuring out the best way to package their ideas to please different funding agencies.
"There have been grants on which I have come really close. In three cases I came to the very last stage after multiple cuts. It's frustrating when you can see how close you are to having the funding to do really exciting work."
