WYPR: Stimulus to Aid Baltimore Area's Research Institutes (2009-05-05)

The stimulus bill recently passed by Congress, provides billions in new funding for research and development. That's good news for Baltimore, home to research powerhouse Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Baltimore. Both are revving up. The government is fast-tracking the R&D timetable to get those stimulus dollars flowing quickly. WYPR's Georgia Samios reports.

Twelve hundred people, resumes in hand, are flowing into a Johns Hopkins University job fair at its Eastern campus on 33rd Street. Mostly college graduates, they are hoping to snag the stimulus-generated jobs that will be coming - in grants and contract administration, information technology, finance, research, and labs.When? Here's Cherita Hobbs, a Hopkins HR official:

"Anywhere between now and September twenty-ten, actually."

Hopkins scoops up more federal research and development dollars than any other university in the country - 1.3 billion dollars in fiscal 2007. That includes defense work. But the new money, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is for non-defense research, much of it health related. There's an extra 10 billion dollars from the National Institutes of Health, or N-I-H, alone. That's welcome after what's been, in real terms, five years of decline, says Hopkins' acting provost, Scott Zeger, himself a scientist.

"This is probably not very much money in military terms, but for public health or biomedical research, this is a very large bonus. It's about a 20-percent increase, 20- to 25-percent increase, on the base, all starting almost instantaneously and ending almost instantaneously. So, that's why this is an unusual event."

One way NIH will get money out quickly is to bankroll proposals already favorably reviewed, but left hanging, because there wasn't enough money. Hopkins typically gets two-and-a-half to three percent of NIH funding - that amounted to 582 million dollars in fiscal 2008. Zeger figures it will get a similar percent of these "shovel ready" proposals. Hopkins also is putting in for six large renovation grants, Zeger adds, and it's eying another big pot of money.

"There's one other very important source of investment for Johns Hopkins, and that is there's going to be about 19 billion dollars invested in health informatics The government is investing a sizeable amount of money to digitize medical records and to then allow us to learn as we treat."

Zeger's "rough guesstimate" is that 10 to 15 thousand Hopkins jobs are research related. And with grants beginning to land, more will be coming. Across town, Jim Hughes, vice president for research and development at the University of Maryland Baltimore, estimates that 4,000 of its sixty-five hundred staff are actively engaged in grant-funded research. Now, Hughes says, they're applying for more.

"It's been a very busy two months as we've been pursing this additional money and just in the last three weeks, we've put in over 500 grants directly targeting on the stimulus money."

And new jobs?

"We're estimating that would probably be anywhere from 200, maybe even as many as
400 new jobs."

Economist Darius Irani, an expert in economic and workforce development at Towson University,
says the new funding can help Baltimore bridge the gap until the economy begins to recover. The jobs are aimed at people with bachelor's degrees rather than the advanced degrees often required in research.

"This creates a great opportunity for Baltimore metropolitan residents to get a job in a very difficult job market . . .I think these are going to be jobs that are going to be accessible to a larger group of individuals than typical than some of the scientific jobs are."

Irani and others like Paul Shapiro, associate dean for research and graduate studies at Maryland's School of Pharmacy, hope the new research will produce results that will stimulate longer term investment.

"These grants will last for two years, basically the money has to be spent within two years, and at the end of that time period we're hoping we will have data, the support, that we can write additional grants to maintain these projects and also it's hoped funding for NIH will increase proportionately."

Other Maryland universities also stand to tap the extra funding. All that research and spin-off activity should help buttress what Towson's Irani calls the three legs of Maryland's new economy -- eds, meds, and feds. And Baltimore is at the epicenter.