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Editorial
The last few years have seen significant changes in the profile for graduate education and research at MIT. In keeping with MIT tradition, faculty-led research and scholarship maintain their position at the forefront of research, both in the traditional disciplines and in innovative initiatives in emerging fields. Always dynamic throughout the Institute's history, MIT's research portfolio is currently being transformed at an even greater pace.
The beginning of the 2002-2003 school year is a good time to reflect on our present position – what stage are we at in this evolution? At one level the numbers speak for themselves. After a decade of slow or declining research volume, over the last several years MIT has experienced real research growth. During Fiscal Year 2002 (ending June 31, 2002) our research volume grew by almost 10% from the previous year, now standing at $448M. By way of comparison, FY 2001 showed a growth rate of 6.1%.
Several reasons lie behind this growth, all characterized by an essential theme: the constant effort to make MIT attractive to the very best graduate students and faculty, and to enable these researchers to go where their curiosity leads them. The successes developing within our research environment result from the creativity of our faculty and staff and the Institute's support of their research. Important stimulants include, first, the renewal of our faculty resulting from 80 of our colleagues taking advantage of the early retirement program in 1996. Second, is the growth of new disciplines and new interdisciplinary research areas. Third, the direct subsidy of graduate research education helps us continue to attract the best students into our graduate programs and make MIT's cost of research competitive with programs in our peer private research universities. Finally, the increase in graduate student housing, the upgrading of research facilities in many research areas, and the creation of totally new facilities in others, also have contributed.
The MIT faculty is changing. Of the approximately 964 faculty members who are leading us into the fall semester, 318 have joined us since July 1996. The schools of Science and Engineering alone count for 172 faculty colleagues belonging to this cohort. These new colleagues have brought with them new ideas, new research directions, and new collaborations across traditional boundaries. The schools and the Office of the Provost are emphasizing the need to support these younger faculty and their new initiatives. The dividends are apparent. As an example, the 29 faculty who came together to win the U.S. government's $50M award for the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology reveal an average time on the MIT faculty of 11.6 years, as compared to 15.2 years for the rest of the faculty in the schools of Science and Engineering.
The new resources the Institute is devoting to graduate education and research constitute another substantial set of ingredients. Most important is our system for subsidizing graduate research assistants on research contracts and grants through cost-sharing 65% of the academic year tuition and 100% of the summer tuition. At tuition rates for this fiscal year, these subsidies amount to $27,500 per student or over $68.3M in subsidies forecast for this year. In addition, this fall the Presidential Graduate Fellowship Program will support 170 first-year graduate students across our five schools and help us remain competitive, especially in those areas of scholarship highly subsidized in our peer institutions' graduate programs. The MIT budget directly supports this fellowship program, and plans to raise endowment to support it more strongly are being developed. Endowment commitments have been very hard to find. Currently we have endowment support for only 70 fellowships for new students in the fall of 2004. The Provost's Office sees continuing this program as one of its highest priorities.
Upgrading the research infrastructure is also near the top of the list of priorities. To date, most of the improvements have come as renovations of space for new faculty, although other pockets of renovation are ready for inspection. For samples, take a look at the Hatsopoulos Laboratories in Mechanical Engineering (on the second floor of Building 3, occupying 5,600 sq. ft.), or the sixth floor of Building 37 in the Center for Space Research. In the next several years, significant new research and teaching spaces in facilities will appear in the Ray and Maria Stata Center, the Brain and Cognitive Science Center, and the renovation of Building 18 for the Department of Chemistry. These new facilities represent commitments by MIT and our supporters to the increased importance of information sciences in the years ahead, and to the strategically important push by MIT into neuroscience as led by the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the Picower Center for Learning and Memory. The renovation of Building 18 for the Chemistry Department represents the type of difficult, infrastructure upgrade that is needed to keep our facilities competitive for world-class research.
The campus is also witnessing an exciting, substantial increase in life science research. While others are better able to describe the opportunities for societal and economic impact caused by the explosion in our understanding of living systems, it is clear that research in life sciences is quickly spreading from its traditional base in modern biology and impacting much of science and engineering. The creation of the Division of Biological Engineering has catalyzed much of this activity in the School of Engineering, forging links to other engineering and science departments. The Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) constitutes the academic bridge between MIT and Harvard Medical School. The doubling of the NIH research budget from 1992 to 2002 has fueled the life sciences research engine. The promise for the future is bright. Growth in our research volume in life sciences is very evident in the figure, in both the increased fraction of research supported by NIH and the increase in research volume of the life-science related units. The total research volume represented here is $448M. The $83.5M from Health and Human Services (HHS) represents a 38% increase over 1997, even more remarkable when compared to the approximately 20% decreases in Department of Energy and NASA funding, and the almost flat funding from the Department of Defense over the same time period.
The chart does not include the research volume of the Whitehead Institute for Biological Research (WIBR), which was $135M in FY2002 ($105M went to research carried out by the MIT-Whitehead Human Genome Center) and led by 15 of our faculty colleagues, and the research funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which was $12M in FY2001. For reference, the same distribution of research volume is shown in 1985.
The shift into life sciences and other experimentally intensive disciplines comes at a price. Biological laboratory facilities are needed where none existed before (sometimes I think every faculty member will sooner or later want a tissue culture facility or a fume hood) and new types of experimental infrastructure are also necessary. We are working to develop these experimental facilities, much as we did for new facilities in physical sciences in the decades before. Examples include the MIT-Harvard Medical School Facility for High-Field NMR, where a state-of-the-art 900 MHz system is under construction; the MIT-Whitehead Biological Imaging Center in Building 24 that will be the home of a high-field cryo-TEM; and the collaboration with the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital to form the Martinos Center for Functional Imaging. All of these initiatives have very substantial external support.
Industrial support has also strongly contributed to the growth of our research volume, which has grown from $56M in FY1997 to $86M in FY2002, an increase of 55%. This support has come in the form of traditional, single-investigator grants and larger research partnerships. It is interesting that out of the eight research partnerships that MIT has established, four heavily involve life science research.
One question that we need to debate is the extent to which growth in research is healthy or even sustainable for MIT. We should recall that the increased research activities and size of our graduate programs are being administered by an almost unchanging number of faculty and senior research staff. A growth rate at a couple of points above the CPI (Consumer Price Index) would seem appropriate if a research-intensive university like MIT is to absorb the higher inflation rate; the Higher Education Price index typically runs 2 points higher than the CPI.
It is also clear that MIT still faces an enormous amount of work in the future if we are to continue to improve our infrastructure for research, and to continue to identify the resources needed to support graduate research and education. Even simply maintaining our competitive position will be difficult, because additional internal resources will be scarce. Equity markets have suffered badly and with them MIT's financial flexibility. The need for resources for new faculty will continue unabated, first, because we must do the very best we can to launch their careers, and second, because this is the very best investment we can make: these colleagues' energy will ensure that MIT's research and education efforts will continue to develop new research frontiers.
The wonderful support of Lydia Snover, assistant to the Provost for Institutional Research, in the preparation of this note is gratefully acknowledged.
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