Academic Excellence

MSU’s research and contract expenditures from state, private and federal funding sources totaled $193 million, according to Vice President for Research and Economic Development Renee Reijo Pera. It marks more than a decade that research expenditures at MSU have topped $100 million. Research takes place in 44 research centers and more than 300 on-campus labs around campus.

• In total for the year, MSU researchers were awarded grants and other funding totaling $453.7 million.
• MSU faculty Amy Trowbridge received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to research tree chemistry, and its relation to climate change and bark beetle kill.
• Faculty members submitted an all-time high number of grant proposals: 1,235 — up 6 percent over the prior year.
• Over the last year, 590 total faculty members served as principal investigators or co-investigators on grant projects. In all, some 85 percent of MSU’s tenure-track faculty were involved in at least one grant-funded research project.
• William Inskeep, professor of land resources and environmental sciences, discovered a new lineage of microbes living in Yellowstone National Park’s thermal features that sheds light on the origin of life on earth.
• MSU polar scientist John Priscu contributed new research on how an abnormal season of intense glacial melt in 2002 triggered multiple, distinct changes in the physical and biological characteristics of Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys over the ensuing decade.
• Connie B. Chang, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, received an National Institutes of Health Career Award for her work entitled “Understanding Spatial Heterogeneity in Biofilms Using Colloidal Engineering.”
• Earth science professor Jordy Hendrikx and political scientist Jerry Johnson formed the White Heat project to understand why outdoor recreationists take risks in the backcountry that could cost them their lives— in the hopes of developing educational materials that will save lives.