Grantopedia

Huge numbers from Cayuse customers

We've tallied Cayuse customer usage stats from 2009 and the numbers surprised and impressed us. We knew that usage and volume would be up significantly in 2009, owing to the Recovery Act grant opportunities and the addition of many new customers. But we were pleasantly surprised to see that volume on the Cayuse platform had nearly tripled from 2008 levels.

In aggregate, Cayuse customers submitted federal grant proposals worth over $17 billion in 2009. That's up from $6 billion in 2008.

Year over year, the average medium- to large-sized customer site more than doubled the number of proposals they created and submitted using Cayuse424. On average, the total proposed dollars tripled for those customers from their 2008 levels. That's a huge increase in volume.

The platform becomes more valuable over time. For a constant price, customers can dramatically increase proposal volume and the associated potential downstream funding. In 2009, Cayuse424 allowed customers to respond to the huge increase in Recovery Act opportunities without additional investment.

Research Grants in Kansas

Two Cayuse customer sites in Kansas have announced research grant awards.

At the University of Kansas, there was a $300,000 lung cancer research award to Emily Grant made under the Recovery Act. 

Scott’s research is directed at understanding how a particular lung enzyme works — the cytochrome P450 enzyme that breaks down nicotine

And up the way, at Wichita State, a $20 million grant from the NSF is being shared among several Kansas schools, most of which are Cayuse customers.

The five-year award is for the Kansas NSF EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research), a statewide program that includes WSU and other major Kansas research universities. It will provide a fresh integrative approach to address climate change and renewable energy challenges

Cayuse customers share gene research grant

Two Cayuse customers, Kaiser Permanente and UC San Francisco, are sharing a research grant from the NIH to conduct genetic epidemiology research on a database of over 100,000 participants. The $24.8 million grant will create a new resource for studying disease. From the Kaiser press release:

The resulting resource will give researchers an entirely new platform for studying genetic and environmental influences over time on a wide variety of health conditions, across diverse populations.

The UCSF Institute for Human Genetics is the partner on the project and will perform the actual genotyping. Grant funds will be shared by both institutions. 

Congratulations to both institutions! 

Web 2.0 for researchers

The NIH is funding university-driven development of a web 2.0 social networking application. As described in the press release, it's

a two-year, $12.2 million grant to bolster a national, Facebook-like, professional social network that enables scientists to find new biomedical research and partnerships.

There have been a number of commercial attempts at this concept, though there don't seem to be any clear market leaders. Perhaps this effort will have a better chance.

(h/t to the ever-vigilant Dave Cassidy at TCG for the links.)

Lots of attention on Grants.gov

This is not the kind of attention anyone would want. Unfortunately, Grants.gov's successes are being over-shadowed by capacity problems, which are now being exposed by the huge wave of grants created by the ARRA stimulus funds.

While there is often talk of it, in desperate moments, no one is serious about going back to paper.

If only there were a better way! One solution would be to bolt on a web-based front end to Grants.gov. Let people prepare their proposals in a browser interface and eliminate the errors before submission. That would alleviate the burden on the servers. If only there were such a solution available now without a lot of engineering required. Oh wait, there is!

Stimulus Plan means more grant activity

Though the details are not yet final, it's clear the Stimulus Plan will pump a lot of money into science and education. For an overview of the proposed spending, take a look at the concise table at ProPublica.org.

ScienceInsider at AAAS has also identified some big ticket spending for the NSF, DOE, NASA and other agencies doing science research.

They've got more background on the huge $10 Billion destined for the NIH. That's billion with a "B"!

The bill's total represents a major increase over the earlier House version of the bill, which set aside $3.5 billion for NIH.

Presumably, much of this funding will be distributed through existing federal grant mechanisms. That means: Grants.gov. It also means lots of increased traffic over the Cayuse platform. We're designed for this. We're ready.

Investing in IT in uncertain economic times

Tight economic realities force hard decisions on where to spend and where to cut. I was inspired by this post by Tracy Mitrano on The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog:

In keeping with the Chinese adage about crisis and opportunity, these uncertain economic times provide information technologies with a lemons-to-lemonade moment in which we can re-evaluate the integral, and even progressive, role that we play within our institutions.

It inspires me to see IT stakeholders advocating bold solutions. This economic climate provides our prospective customers a chance to see Cayuse424 in a new light: as one of those rare win-win technology solutions needed in times like these.

Cayuse has always sought to deliver huge value to our customers. Our goal is to make it easier for research organizations to win research funding. So, the simple premise of improved research revenue generation should cause research organizations to evaluate the important role Cayuse424 can play.

Universities speak out on science research funding

There's a growing clamor for more federal research funding coming from some of the most powerful and important research institutions in the country, who have created an organization called Broken Pipeline to publicize the problem.
 
Some sobering statistics on the difficulty of securing funding, as reported in Inside Higher Education:

• The overall success rate for the vital NIH R01 (or Research Project) grants, or their equivalents, decreased from 32 percent in 1999 to 24 percent last year.
• The success rate for applications on their first submission dropped from 29 percent in 1999 to 12 percent last year.

Congressional testimony and sponsorship of this call to action was given by representatives from two Cayuse customer institutions, The Ohio State University, and the University of Texas at Austin.