GW’s Research Ranking Climbs into Top 100
The George Washington University nearly doubled R&D expenditures in FY2010, jumping 34 spots on list
The university’s R&D expenditures from all funding sources—which include grants and contracts from federal, state and local governments, industry, nonprofits, and GW’s internal resources—increased by 97 percent, to $196,917,000 in the 2010 fiscal year over the previous year.
The boost elevated GW to No. 99, up from No. 133, which amounted to the third-largest jump on the list among the top 150 schools. In total, the list includes more than 600 institutions.
GW’s R&D expenditures funded from federal sources only—which include agencies and departments like the NSF, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education—increased by more than a third over the previous year, to $122,357,000. On that list, GW rose to No. 92, up from No. 109.
Expenditures, which represent actual money spent from grants and other resources, are a key measurement of an institution’s research activity.
GW Vice President for Research Leo Chalupa said the jump in the NSF ranking offered “another clear indication that GW is well on its way to realizing President Knapp’s plan of becoming one of the nation’s top research universities.”
According to the Office of the Vice President for Research, the university’s individual awards with the largest research expenditures in the 2010 fiscal year came from the GW Biostatistics Center, which acts as a coordinating center for large-scale clinical trials and epidemiologic studies; and awards focused on HIV and health policy through the School of Public Health and Health Services and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Dr. Chalupa said he expects research expenditures will continue to increase in the long term, particularly with the completion in late-2014 of GW’s new Science and Engineering Hall. The nearly half-million-square-foot teaching and research facility will include state-of-the-art labs that promise to reshape the landscape for GW investigators.
Those will include a three-story-tall "high bay" that will facilitate research on safer and more earthquake-resistant bridges and buildings, among other projects. Plans call for the vast glass-walled lab—visible to passersby on the street—to have reinforced floor and wall spaces capable of withstanding intense horizontal and vertical loads, a dedicated loading dock, and a crane capable of toting 20 tons of material.
The building also will house a 3,600-square-foot greenhouse for teaching and research projects, with a focus on plant-herbivore interactions and the role of plants in developing a more sustainable economy.
And a growing slate of physicists, chemists, biologists and engineers are anticipating the building’s lab for nano-scale research. The lab will be housed in a specially-built "clean room," where particles like dust and dead skin cells are filtered out, since they dwarf projects at the nano-level. The tidiest areas of the lab will contain no more than 100 particles larger than 0.5 microns—roughly half the width of a red blood cell—per cubic foot of air.
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