Times West Virginian: Research funding successful

This article is from the March 9, 2008, edition of The Times West Virginian (Fairmont).

By Jessica Legge
The Times West Virginian


FAIRMONT — The original projects funded through the Research Challenge Grant program turned out to be more successful than the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission’s Division of Science and Research initially anticipated.

The RCG program was essentially made available to professors at West Virginia University and Marshall University who could create scientific research projects with an economic impact and eventually attract their own external funding.

“The Research Challenge Grant program was designed by the Legislature originally to provide a level of research funding to projects that showed a lot of promise for growth,” Dr. Paul Hill, vice chancellor for Science and Research, said.

The West Virginia Legislature stipulated that participants could receive seed funding for up to five years and should be self-sufficient by the end of that time frame. The goal was for grant recipients to initiate a start-up company or sell a commercial application, he said.

The state legislature started the program in 2002. The Research Challenge Fund was created in 2004 to give the Higher Education Policy Commission the authority to support projects through a permanent fund from video lottery proceeds. Hill said the first set of projects reached their five-year mark by July 1, 2007, with the last funding coming from the FY07 budget.

“We can make long-term commitments to these researchers over a number of years,” he said. “Providing long-term funds is exactly what you need for those types of projects.”

Hill said the RCG program funded a total of six projects — four at WVU and two at Marshall — on a variety of research topics. The research efforts were related to subjects such as global positioning, biometrics, plastics, cancer and DNA sensors.

In five instances, companies grew out of the projects. The projects also resulted in 10 patent applications and five patents that were issued.

“We were quite pleased and surprised at the pace at which some of these companies have grown,” Hill said.

He said researchers could initially request a maximum of $500,000 a year. Then they had to continually wean themselves from the state’s support and look for ways to bring in additional funding. Each project received an average of $1.2 million for the entire five years. The state invested a total of $8.4 million in the six projects, and the researchers attracted more than $20 million in external funding.

“Once we seeded the projects, they were able to (bring in) federal grants,” Hill said. “That’s what we were hoping for. We’re trying to position people in West Virginia really to capture the other opportunities out there.”

Over the past few months since the projects expired, the Division of Science and Research conducted a full evaluation of the effectiveness of the RCG program, he said. The division presented the findings, compiled from annual reviews of the individual projects, to the Higher Education Policy Commission at its January meeting. Persons can access the report of five-year outcomes from the first round of Research Challenge Grants online at http://www.wvresearch.org/.

In May 2007, Science and Research issued five new projects for the next five years. Hill said the division will track the new projects, which are in some very exciting areas of research, and see if they experience a similar rate of success.

“This program is so important because it provides an opportunity to diversify the state’s economy,” he said. “It’s providing opportunities to create new types of jobs in West Virginia. The fund is so important in stimulating these new ideas in thinking.”

Through participation in the grant program, the GeoVirtual Laboratory within the WVU Department of Geology and Geography was able to develop cutting-edge geovisualization software. The WVU Office of Technology Transfer has licensed this software, which “uses serious video gaming technology to render massive amounts of geographic information systems data,” to a commercial company called Datacaster.

“The Research Challenge Grant was crucial to develop the technology, and it has provided fantastic opportunities to develop cutting-edge technologies in the research lab,” said Vic Baker, who is co-director of the GeoVirtual Laboratory with Trevor Harris.

Over five years, the project was awarded roughly $2 million of grant money. Baker believes that five years isn’t long enough to define a research agenda, and additional state involvement and funding is needed for WVU’s research and development efforts. “We’re grateful to the Research Challenge Grant,” he said. “We would like to see programs like the Research Challenge Grant continued, except for longer periods.”