From unlocking nature’s fundamental principles through elementary particle physics to unzipping DNA to understand the way living cells function, research at Cornell spans across every science department and almost every scientific topic. Scientific research requires equipment, raw materials and people. To obtain these, however, researchers need one thing: funding. According to an annual report put out by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, researchers at Cornell, not including Weill Medical College, spent about $470 million in the 2008 fiscal year.

The University provides money for faculty salaries and department budgets, which cover administrative expenses in addition to the research needs of the department. Because of this, professors rely on external grants to fund the bulk of their research.

Federal organizations such as the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Departments of Energy and Agriculture provide funding for scientific research in several ways. One way is to apply for funding through the numerous many panels that support research conducted in general areas of study. For example, the Analytical and Surface Chemistry panel, a group within the NSF, offers funding for any research “directed toward the characterization and analysis of all forms of matter,” according to the NSF website. Alternatively, researchers can use funding directed towards specific projects within a well-defined area of study.

Like many scientists at Cornell, the NSF funds Prof. James Sethna, physics. While other funding organizations require a detailed proposal for every project, Sethna said, the NSF does not. In fact, the NSF provides broad and flexible funding.

“In the hard sciences, you mess around and discover something new. It makes no sense to write a new proposal every time,” Sethna said.

The NSF, whose goal is to “support all fields of fundamental science and engineering,” spent around $116 million on Cornell research from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008, according to the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. This contrasts with $190 million — the amount of money from the Department of Health and Human Services — which supports more health and applied research. In the past year, funding from the NSF decreased by 2.6 percent, while funding from the DHHS — an overseer of the NIH — decreased by 4.6 percent.

Prof. Charles Aquadro, molecular biology and genetics, said that competition and shifting interests have affected the amount of funding he has received. Aquadro, who studies the genomic evolution of many organisms, has received grants from the NIH, NSF, USDA and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Recently, his successfully-funded grants have decreased from 25 percent to 10 percent.

According to an NSF publication, “federal funding of academic science and engineering research did not outpace inflation for the second year in a row,” causing a 1.6-percent decline in all federal funding for academic research. In addition, researchers have experienced a higher rate of competition for funding, and panels often favor younger investigators, in an attempt to help them jumpstart their careers.

Despite the competition, scientists in some fields of study still garner large amounts of funding.

“Some areas are very successful [in receiving grants],” Aquadro explained, citing success rates in the fields of genomics and clinical sciences. “The NIH has been shifting its efforts to research directly related to human health.”

Research in genomics, the study of the composition and function of entire genes, has enormous implications in the area of human health, helping to elucidate sources of genetic diseases. NIH’s shifting efforts, he said, will make purely biological research more difficult to fund.

Even so, research in the basic sciences provides the basis for investigations in the applied sciences.

“Some of our best tools have come from basic research,” Aquadro said, suggesting that basic research about proteins that move large molecules and organelles within any cell lays the foundation for studying the movement and function of the HIV virus within the human cell.

The shift towards applied research and the resulting difficulty in getting funded has primarily affected people who work in research labs. While the University pays the salary of faculty researchers, graduate students and lab technicians rely on grants for their stipend or salary.

Prof. Brian Danforth, entomology, said that the difficulty he faces in receiving funding from outside organizations “affects the department’s ability to support graduate students.”

In addition to competition, researchers applying for funding must deal with overhead costs. For any funding granted to a researcher, a percentage of this money goes to the University’s budget. Consequently, researchers must inflate their proposal budgets in order to accommodate all their research needs. This increases the pressure on the funding organization and spurs competition for funding.

In the current economic climate, Cornell faces budget cuts, but according to Sethna, the cuts have not yet affected his research. Rather, the cuts have affected the number of graduate student hired as Teaching Assistants, faculty employment and seminars. In entomology, Danforth says that it has become more “difficult to support staff[s that] keep track of accounting,” and who are essential in helping researchers organize grants and apply for funding. Neither Danforth nor Sethna said that the national economic downturn has affected their research so far. “The federal government can still spend money when they’re broke,” Sethna joked.

Nonetheless, Stephen Kresovich, vice provost for life sciences, said that the budget cuts are affecting all departments in the sciences. Although Cornell has focused more money on improving its molecular and cell biology and computational biology research programs through the New Life Sciences Initiative, no one department is being targeted more.

“People are cautious but optimistic about the life sciences,” Kresovich said, and researchers would use funding and opportunities as they become available in these slow economic times.