CONVERGENCE: For Science & Technology Policymakers and Practitioners

The keys to the success in winning the grant, according to Dr. Holly Given, Director of Science Development and Facilitation for the Joint Oceanographic Initiative, which is administering the project, were the $10 million matching grant of the Innovation Institute and the cabinet-level leadership of the Patrick Administration.

The long-term impact of the state’s matching investment to capture this new federal research money represents a huge economic win for Massachusetts, with the promise of growing an entire industry sector, creating thousands of new jobs.

Three years ago, the Legislature committed to making matching state investments to help secure new federal research awards for the Commonwealth’s academic research centers and institutions.

This represented a major sea change in policy for the state. In the past, Massachusetts, with its world-class universities, teaching hospitals and research institutions, had always captured its disproportionate fair share of federal research dollars.

In three years, the results at the Innovation Institute have very much validated the Legislative vision: its matching investments have helped secure more than $260 million in public and private research awards for the Commonwealth’s academic research centers and institutions, better than a 10-to-1 return on investment.

“When we began this pilot program of matching state investment to capture federal research awards to spur the Massachusetts research enterprise, we initially capped matching investments at $2 million,” said Donald Dubendorf, the Chair of the Governing Board of the Innovation Institute. “The Woods Hole matching investment was $10 million. It’s clear that the state, to continue to succeed, needs to create a larger pot of money for matching investments at a level around $100 million. As Chris Anderson from the Massachusetts High Technology Council has often said: ‘This is a great investment fund because the money is not spent unless the federal research award is won.’”

The matching investments made by the Innovation Institute from the public purpose fund known as the “Research Center Matching Fund” include:

$10 million to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to help it win a $97.7 million federal award to lead a team that will create an ocean observation system off the Massachusetts coast; in total, with five years of maintenance and operating funds for the new ocean observation infrastructure, the matching grant will leverage more than $215 million in federal research funds. (Research Center Matching Grant Program)
$5 million to create the Center of Excellence in Nanomanufacturing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, which, in turn, leveraged a $12.4 million National Science Foundation federal research award to create a Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for High Rate Nanomanufacturing, a partnership of Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the University of New Hampshire. (Center of Excellence Award Program)
$2.78 million to create the Center of Excellence in Apoptosis Research at the Pioneer Valley Sciences Institute in Springfield. The institute is a partnership between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Baystate Medical Center, the two largest employers in the region. The investment is anticipated to leverage an additional $12.5 million in investments from public and private sources. (Center of Excellence Award Program)
$1.975 million to help establish the national Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, under the National Science Foundation’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center program, leveraging a $16 million federal research award. (Research Center Matching Grant Program)
$100,000 to help create the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium, a collaboration of more than 20 Massachusetts universities and colleges and Massachusetts industries, under a federal National Space Grant program coordinated by NASA to fund space-related research and education, which will leverage initially more than $500,000 in anticipated federal funding. (Research Center Matching Grant Program)
$112,000 to support Wheelock College, in partnership with a NASA-funded program to develop a STEM teacher education program, to launch a College Match and Science Education Initiative, in order to create pipeline programs to identify, recruit and retain promising high-school students from diverse communities to become prospective teachers. (Research Center Matching Grant Program)
$150,000 to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, in partnership with the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to support the expanded R&D partnerships at University of Massachusetts campuses to create the framework for a new Center of Excellence in Applied Ocean Systems, reinforcing Massachusetts’ global leadership of its academic research institutions in marine science and technology. (Collaborative R&D Partnership Development Award Program)
$150,000 to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in partnership with the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and MIT, to create a strategic framework for planning the development of coastal observation and predictive systems, as an important first step in competing for federal research awards for ocean observation systems. (Collaborative R&D Partnership Development Award Program)
$148,893 to the Center for Subsurface Sensing & Imaging Systems at Northeastern University, to support the expansion of an existing National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Research Center, to develop new business opportunities, with the goal that the businesses would evolve into self-sustaining enterprises. The investment has helped to leverage two multi-million federal contracts with great economic potential for Massachusetts, creating devices to detect smuggled nuclear materials at airports, ports and borders and to detect suicide bombers at a distance. (Collaborative R&D Partnership Development Award Program)
$150,000 to the Center for Biomedical Innovation at MIT, to leverage major private and federal investments to conduct research leading to fundamental changes in the way the biomedical industry brings new products from the laboratory to the market, improving patient and safety outcomes. The work of the new center contributed in part to the recent $65 million research award by Novartis to MIT to revolutionize the way in which drugs are manufactured. (Collaborative R&D Partnership Development Award Program)
$50,000 to the University of Massachusetts Medical School to explore the feasibility of establishing a Biomarker Imaging Center in Worcester, assessing the extent to which industry may provide financial support for the center and the potential commercial value of the intellectual property to be generated by the center. (Collaborative R&D Partnership Development Award Program)
$150,000 to the University of Massachusetts Lowell, in partnership with biopharmaceutical companies, Tufts University, WPI and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, to develop a pilot program to validate the business case for the Bio-Manufacturing Center to foster collaborative R&D partnerships. (Collaborative R&D Partnership Development Award Program)
$25,000, with an additional $125,000 in reserve, to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Tufts University Veterinary School, to undertake strategic business planning to develop a Center of Biomedical Innovation to transform the biomedical innovation and regulatory processes. (Collaborative R&D Partnership Development Award Program)