While other post-secondary funds have seen dramatic cuts in recent years, such as the provincial government’s $17 million cut to student financial aid in July 2009, research funding at UBC has steadily increased for the last ten years and is still on the rise.

In 2008, over $469 million in research funding was awarded to students and staff at UBC, a 17 per cent increase since 2007.

“The funding is going up at UBC partly because there is more money coming in, but mostly because we hired a lot of really fantastic faculty members over the last decade who are now becoming mature established researchers and are getting more funding,” explained UBC VP Research Dr John Hepburn.

Thanks to this increase, 7313 projects were funded in 2008, up from 7074 projects funded the previous year. This moves UBC to third from fourth position for national research funding, behind the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta, according to a Research Infosource report.

Important for students and staff alike, these research grants fund projects, provide opportunities for undergraduate, graduate and PhD research, and lure professors and researchers from around the world to the UBC campus. One of these faculty members attracted to UBC was Nobel Prize Winner Carl Weiman, who joined the university in 2007 as a member of UBC’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. Weiman is one of two Nobel laureates to have ever worked at a Canadian university.

This increase has had a positive effect on campus, improving research buildings and increasing research opportunities for students.

TRIUMF, a national laboratory that conducts research in particle and nuclear physics, has been in partnership with UBC for over 40 years and is expanding thanks to the increase in research funds.

“Over the past few years the work of the nuclear management significantly expanded due to UBC’s ability to bring research dollars to do that kind of work,” explained TRIUMF’s media contact Tim Meyer.

Over 75 students participate in co-op programs at the laboratory each year, and when UBC researchers get access to more research funding they are able to set up more collaboration with TRIUMF.

“Having TRIUMF down the street allows graduate students at UBC to actually do their PhD research at TRIUMF and participate in lectures, in workshops and really bring in the top minds in the world right here in Vancouver,” he said.

However, just because UBC’s research funds have shown an increase does not mean they are exempt from funding cuts, said Dean Kuusela, senior manager of the UBC Office of Research Services.

While the federal government has made research funding in universities across Canada a priority, UBC has already experienced the effect of provincial funding cuts.

These provincial cuts include a $15 million cut to the Michael Smith Foundation for Health research, a foundation that supports cancer research and other important initiatives at UBC and other universities in the province.

Falling endowment funds have also put research funding at risk. Kuusala explained that the markets have been badly hit, and as a result, the absolute value of the endowment funds has gone way down.

“This means that the amount of internal funding is reduced, which has affected internal research funding, student scholarships. Anything that is funded from internal endowments will be impacted because of this phenomenon,” he explained.

Competition is tough for UBC, with other institutions making their mark. UVic saw their research funding increase over 26 per cent in 2008/2009.

“This is a national and international competitive process. We get more research funding when our researchers are more successful than other researchers in other universities across Canada,”explained Kuusala.

Hepburn said that research at UBC should strive for expansion in spite of the loss to their endowment fund and cuts to student aid, in order to provide its students with world-class research opportunities and uphold its responsibility as a world-class university.

“I think that UBC and other big universities have an obligation to do research. No other institution in our society has the ability to create such drastic social change,” he said.

Unlike student aid, which is primarily funded through the provincial government, research grants are made available to staff and students at UBC through over 1000 sources. This includes the federal government, whose three main agencies contributed roughly 30 per cent, or $172 million, of the total funding available to UBC in 2008, as well as outside and private resources.

“UBC is one of the top research universities in Canada and the world,” said Kuusela. “There is no reason why this should change.”

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