Brandeis University researchers have received a total of over $9 million in 64 awards from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in February 2009 to stimulate the economy, according to Assistant Provost for Research Administration Paul O'Keefe.One main goal of the stimulus package was to create or retain jobs directly or through increasing the circulation of money throughout the economy, and the awards will help fund the researcher's current work.

New funding proposal opportunities for Brandeis were mainly available from government organizations such as the National Institutes of Health, O'Keefe explained.

"The faculty was very aggressive in seeking funding opportunities that were appropriate for their research program," he said. The Act states that that one of stimulus bill's goals is "to provide investments needed to increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health."

Some institutions also offered funding to previously submitted proposals that had received a high score from the government but for which money had not been available previously, he explained.

For the first quarter, O'Keefe said the University reported creating or retaining about 15 full-time jobs with stimulus money. He added that most of the money Brandeis received was in the form of two-year projects, so additional funding will come in after the initial funds run out within that time period.

The University had submitted 76 proposals worth about $61.5 million last spring to the organizations distributing funds.

Among those proposals were some for renovating existing facilities, an area where the University was less successful in receiving funding.

"But that money was extremely hard to get at and it was also geographically distributed by the [government], ... so we didn't have a really good chance of getting that money in the first place," O'Keefe explained.

"Our success rate in getting the money that we did submit for the research proposals was quite good relative to some other folks," said O'Keefe.

Processing the stimulus proposals added to an already high workload for the Office of Research Administration, O'Keefe pointed out, given that funding proposals had already risen 30 percent over the past three years because there was less funding available from other sources.

Cultural anthropologist Prof. Ricardo Godoy (Heller) won $450,000 in National Science Foundation funding to support Ph.D. students in American universities learning data collection methods as part of a large research project studying a native Amazonian population in Bolivia, according to the Brandeis University Web site.

With regular NIH funding, there are three deadlines throughout the year. For the stimulus money, "the timeline was much shorter than it usually is. ... If you got the money there were very quick time frames to spend the money, because the point of the stimulus is of course to get the economy going," O'Keefe said.

Prof. Susan Birren (BIOL) received three different grants from the ARRA, she said.

She said that over the past few years, funding rates from the NIH have been very low, but that upon receiving government stimulus money, the organization was able to honor high-quality grants that it previously had to shelve due to lack of funding.

She continued, "There are many, many grants sitting at NIH that were scored very well but there wasn't enough money to pay them all." She added that "the idea is if you give money to NIH, there are all these projects that are ready to roll" and are therefore , able to enter the economy quickly after funds are received.

"The biggest chunk of money that I got was a grant that I had written which had been peer reviewed at NIH and had done very well but had missed the line at which they were paying," she explained.

She said she received two smaller grants to support summer undergraduate research.

With regard to the research grants, Birren explained that the government does not just fund the direct cost of the research but also provides extra funds to the University to offset its costs in supporting the research such as maintenance. The direct cost of her research grant is $250,000 a year.

"One of the things the science faculty felt really strongly about was that it was really worth our time and energy to do everything that we could to try to pull in this stimulus money, both because it was good for us and because it was something we could do to support the University during this period of financial problems," Birren said.

The grant enabled her to fund the position of a lab staff member, while the remainder of the funding went mainly toward supplies.

"What seem like little things add up to huge amounts of money," she said. "I asked for very little equipment for this grant because I felt that the best way to get money into the economy was to spend it on people and supplies," explaining that she shifted money toward salaries when she redesigned the grant application for the stimulus funds.