Calit2 Contributes Healthy Research Budget to UCSD, Now Ranked Fifth in Nation

San Diego, CA, July 31, 2006  -- UC San Diego is now ranked among the top five U.S. universities based on their federal research and development expenditures, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) contributed to the university's impressive showing.

Researchers from two federally-funded projects at Calit2 -- NIH's $4 million Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD), and NSF's Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE). Pictured from left to right: WIISARD's Leslie Lenert, Neil McCurdy and Doug Palmer; RESCUE's Javier Rodriguez Molina, B.S. Manoj and Alexandra Hubenko.

According to newly released figures from the National Science Foundation (NSF), UCSD ranked fifth among 600 U.S. universities in federal R&D spending in fiscal 2003-'04 - up two points from the previous year.

The NSF reported that UCSD spent a total $465.6 million in federal R&D funds during the period. Calit2 was involved on projects totaling $50 million in research spending in the same year, most but not all of it federally funded. Of that, spending by projects managed through Calit2's business office at UCSD more than quadrupled from the previous year to $3 million.

Other research universities in the top 10, in order, were Johns Hopkins, Washington, Stanford, Michigan, UCSD, UCLA, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin-Madison, MIT and UCSF.
 
UCSD moved from seventh in the 2002-2003 ranking to the current fifth place, and has remained among the top 10 research universities in R&D expenditures for well over a decade.
 
When the NSF tabulates U.S. university research spending for 2004-'05, they will show impressive figures for both UCSD and its Calit2 division. R&D expenditures for UCSD from all sources totaled $728.4 million in the last fiscal year. Calit2-managed projects spent just over $5 million in 2004-'05, on top of nearly $57 million spent on projects that are affiliated with the institute but managed by other business units on campus. That brings the total of Calit2 research spending in the last fiscal year to $62 million, with spending expected to increase again in 2005-'06.

The two largest federally-funded projects managed through Calit2's business office were funded by the NSF: OptIPuter, and Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events. Calit2 director Larry Smarr is the PI on the OptIPuter project, and division director Ramesh Rao is PI on the UCSD portion of the RESCUE grant, which was awarded jointly to Calit2 investigators at UC Irvine and UCSD.