The College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (CPMS) received $12.7 million in external grant funds in 2015—the largest amount that CPMS has received in a single year and the largest amount that any college at BYU has received in the past decade. CPMS faculty received a total of 121 external research grants in 2015.
“The faculty have been successful this year because they made a consistent effort at submitting proposals,” Conrad Monson, Research Development Specialist for CPMS Research Development, said.
“We were really pleased with that and we recognize it’s not [the deans] who went out there and got the funds,” Dean Scott Sommerfeldt said. “It was the faculty who were writing the proposals and coming up with the ideas and working hard to get them.”
The CPMS faculty’s innovative proposals helped departments within the college receive their highest numbers ever The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry received about $6.5 million, the Department of Computer Science received about $2.4 million, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy received about $2.3 million.
“Most of the departments did quite well with their funding increases, so it’s nice to see it wasn’t just a single department that was doing it all,” Sommerfeldt said.
Overall, breaking the external grant funds record isn’t significant merely because of the dollar amount but because of the research and resources the money will make available to CPMS students.
“This is really a means to an end; it’s not the end in itself,” Associate Dean Tom Sederberg said. “The money should not be the emphasis here. The great research…and the students who are being trained are the things to celebrate, not just the dollar amount.”