University research squeezed in S.D.

South Dakota's ambitions when it comes to public university research have been hampered by declining federal investments, though officials insist it's not as bad here as in other places.

Six years ago, the state's public university system brought in $154 million in research grants and contracts — a figure fueled in part at that time by federal stimulus dollars.

But the amount has fallen to half that as stimulus dollars went away, and as sequestration curtailed the federal spending stream, especially in agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

As a result, the number of people at South Dakota State University paid through research grants and contracts — primarily graduate and post-graduate students and assistants, as well as support staff — has dropped from 1,511 in 2012 to 1,069 this year.

The decline is similar at the University of South Dakota — from 599 in 2012 to 469 now.

"What that means is, we have less research productivity," said Mary Berry, vice president for research at USD. "You have fewer people involved in research, fewer students that we are able to have in our programs and thus fewer graduate students who are educated."

With fewer than 20 percent of graduate students nationally ever succeeding in getting faculty positions and setting up their own labs — at an average age of 38 — the fear is that today's environment will quash research passion and send would-be scientists down other career paths.

As it is, there are places across the American landscape today where expensive new research laboratories sit virtually empty on college campuses.

In the past decade, the University of Virginia doubled its amount of lab space for biomedical research, creating room for 700 additional scientists and technicians. But when NIH grant dollars didn't come through, UVA shed more than 300 research jobs, and its new buildings now get only light use.

At the University of Chicago, three laboratories were closed last year because of cuts at the NIH, costing six medical researchers their jobs.

"Those are the realities in many places that have overbuilt," said Kevin Kephart, vice president for research at SDSU.

"We're fortunate; that's not an issue here. We're nowhere close to being overbuilt at any of our research sites."

In fact Kephart said SDSU intends to move forward on a new $47 million facility tentatively named the Interdisciplinary Bioscience and Engineering Laboratory, which eventually will bring researchers together from diverse disciplines across campus to tackle such challenges as hunger, obesity and autoimmune diseases.

Still, even though public universities here aren't sitting with unused lab space, places such SDSU have not been immune from the fallout of curtailed federal spending.

In the summer of 2012, the Brookings-based school lost 27 full-time-equivalent positions — contract workers, graduate students and support staff — when NIH decided not to renew a research contract tied to a massive child health study.

One of the first sites to represent rural areas in the National Children's Study, SDSU expected to get $60 million during the life of a project evaluatiing how an array of genetic and environmental factors affect children's health from birth to 21. But NIH revealed in some of its budget documents "the reality of flat or shrinking budgets for biomedical research" was causing it to reassess SDSU's participation in the study.

Today, that role "has certainly been curtailed, and the number of employees in that research center has diminished dramatically," Kephart said.

An outcome of reduced federal spending that shows up often in South Dakota these days involves faculty members who spend less time on basic research. They don't have the grant money to pay adjunct professors or post-doctoral students to come in and help with some of their teaching responsibilties, said Paul Turman, vice president of academic affairs for the Board of Regents.

Researchers in South Dakota also are waiting much longer to learn whether they will receive grants and contracts, and that can be a problem, Turman said.

"As a faculty member, while you want to be submitting for a whole host of research projects, you don't want to have five land at the last minute and you don't have the capacity to fulfill the scope of what is proposed," he said.

Interestingly enough, federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation aren't turning off their grant spigots at places such as Dakota State University in Madison. Dakota State officials just announced that the school's Cyber Corps scholarship program was awarded a $4.6 million renewal grant as part of the NSF's Scholarship for Service program.

Those scholarship dollars help to pay undergraduate and graduate costs for students who often go into cyber security fields.

"These grants, especially in computer science and cyber security, have actually increased over the last three to five years," said Josh Pauli, associate professor of cyber operations at Dakota State. "That's obviously a good thing for us being so heavy in cyber security."

What's also happened at the research universities in the state is a pivot toward more public-private partnerships. Campuses are getting more aggressive in pursuing fee-for-service-based activity that ultimately can help industries with challenges they might be facing, Turman said.

"The federal government in the 1980s said: 'Why are you holding on to all of this intellectual property? Put it out in the marketplace, and as a country we can benefit from the economic development that comes from it,' " he said. "That's brought about this fee-for-service activity. Federal funding agencies want to see that, want to see what can be done at the end of the road with research activity."

Is it replacing all the lost federal agency research dollars? Hardly, research leaders in the state say.

But there is optimism that things might be turning around. Berry said the U.S. Senate has been talking about reauthorizing the America COMPETES Act, which would revitalize research spending.

And in lieu of that, universities in the state are doing a job of readjusting, SDSU's Kephart said.

"The discussion at our institution is, 'What do we do to become more competitive?' " he said. "You don't do that by saying we're going to be competitive in each and every discipline everywhere. We have to focus our resources where we can make sure we're competitive with other institutions for those dollars. That's what we're doing. There's no doom and gloom here."

Declining research jobs

DOWNTURN: The head count of employees paid through research grants and contracts at research schools such as the University of South Dakota and South Dakota State University has been declining as federal investment in university research has gone down.

JOB TYPES: Most of those are part-time jobs held by research associates and coordinators, civil service staff (secretarial, program assistants), and post-doctoral, doctoral and master's degree students.

By the numbers

$154 million in research grants and contracts