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Despite steep funding reductions in recent years, the innovation driver known as USTAR is enjoying a banner year pulling in research grants, topping $22 million in the first half of fiscal year 2011.
The U.S. Department of Energy is this year's major funder of the Utah Science, Technology and Research initiative, with a $5 million extension to an existing grant to the University of Utah to hunt promising geologic formations for "sequestering" carbon dioxide. Another $10 million went to Utah State University.
"It's an indication that the taxpayers and the Legislature need to be patient because it takes a couple of years for even a well-established researcher with a national reputation to transplant to a new institution. We are seeing those productivity gains now that those researchers are in place," said USTAR spokesman Michael O'Malley.
USTAR is a state investment to leverage university research into job-creating enterprises and to help commercialize technologies in the private sector. The state's research universities have used the money to attract world-class researchers to Utah.
"It takes some settling-in time for our researchers to learn who they can collaborate with. It's the collaborations that allow them to go after bigger opportunities," O'Malley said.
Over the past few years, however, USTAR's state appropriation has been slashed by 28 percent from $19.3 million to $14.5 million. Meanwhile, USTAR's outreach team has helped attract $35 million in private money, mostly in the form of venture capital, according to a press release. Since the initiative's 2006 authorization by the Utah Legislature, its researchers have secured $66 million in grants, a third of it coming in the final six months of 2010.
Citing data from the U.'s Bureau of Economic and Business Research, USTAR officials calculate these awards will generate 2,434 jobs. Most are research positions, but nearly 900 are in construction.
The U.'s big rainmaker is geologist Brian McPherson, who is exploring ways to safely inject and store carbon dioxide from power plants deep inside geological formations. His efforts to keep climate-changing carbon out of the atmosphere has secured almost $14 million federal grants since his arrival in 2007, according to O'Malley.
Another USTAR rainmaker is nanotech guru Marc Porter, who holds appointments to the U. chemistry department and three other departments. His interdisciplinary team last year secured $2.3 million from the National Institutes of Health to build on advances in magnetic sensing to develop new cancer-detection devices based on nanotechnology.
But the big winner for 2010 was USU's Energy Dynamics Laboratory, which reeled in two-thirds of a$10 million earmark secured by then-Sen. Bob Bennett for the Logan university. EDL is using the money to support research into growing algae for use as a liquid fuel, electrifying roadways, "intuitive" buildings that use lighting efficiently and "next-generation" fossil fuels.
USTAR paying off
The innovation initiative's federal grants continue to outpace what the state spends to support research to develop promising technologies.