Ever wondered how much spending is involved in research at Cornell? A Cornell Research report gives light on spending data from 2016-2017 school year. The report broke down spending into two main categories: organized research and departmental research.
Organized research, as defined by the report, “represents the research efforts funded by sponsored programs and federal and NYS appropriations and internal solicitations, including formal cost sharing.”
Research that is funded by gifts to departments and with faculty research accounts falls under departmental research, according to the report. Organized research spending accounted for 83 percent of all research spending and $985.5 million was spent in total.
When the research spending was broken down by colleges, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences ranked first in $193.6 million. Contrastingly, the SC Johnson College of Business ranked last with $4.3 million in research spending.
As for Cornell’s New York City campuses, Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech had organized research expenditures of $271.4 million and $4.4 million, respectively. Within science disciplines, spending in biology related areas was more than three times the research spending in computer science, chemistry and physics combined.
Jonathan Ou ’20, a student in the College of Arts and Sciences, gave his thoughts on the data presented in the report.
“It makes sense that we are spending the most amount of money on biology-related research because diseases are something that afflict everyone, regardless of their age or what country they are from. If we were to able to find a cure to cancer, for instance, it would save millions of lives annually,” he said.
According to the National Science Foundation, in 2016, Cornell spent more on research and development than Yale University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley.