PASADENA, Calif.-Research in genomic sciences, astronomy, seismology, and neuroeconomics are some of the many projects being funded at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
As part of the federal government program of stimulating the economy, ARRA is providing approximately $21 billion for research and development. The goal is for the funding to lead to new scientific discoveries and to support jobs.
ARRA provides the funds to federal research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, which then support proposals submitted by universities and other research institutions from across the country.
Caltech has received 82 awards to date, totaling more than $33 million. Spending from the grants began in the spring of 2009 and thus far has led to the support of 93 jobs at the Institute.
"This funding will help lead to substantive and important work here at Caltech," says Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau. "We're grateful to have this opportunity to advance research designed to benefit the entire country."
For biologist Paul Sternberg, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology at Caltech and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, the ARRA funds mean an opportunity to improve upon WormBase, an ongoing multi-institutional effort to make genetic information on the experimental animal C. elegans freely available to the world.
"All biological and biomedical researchers rely on publicly available databases of genetic information," says Sternberg. "But it has been expensive and difficult to extract information from scientific research articles. We have developed some tools to make it less expensive and less tedious to get the job done, for WormBase and many other groups."
Sternberg's ARRA funds-$989,492-will go towards developing a more efficient approach to extracting key facts from published biological-science papers.
Among the other diverse Caltech projects receiving ARRA funds are:
- a catalog of jellyfish DNA;
- improving the speed of data collection at Caltech's Center of Excellence in Genomic Science;
- studies into the fundamentals of particle physics;
- the California High School Cosmic Ray Observatory (CHICOS) program, which provides high school students access to cosmic ray research;
- the search for new astronomical objects such as flare stars and gamma-ray bursts, and the means to make those discoveries accessible to the public; and
- a $1 million upgrade of the Southern California Seismic Network.
Caltech Professor of Mechanical Engineering Tim Colonius received ARRA funds for research into better understanding how noise is created by turbulence in the exhaust of turbofan aircraft engines and what might be done to mitigate it. Jet noise is an environmental problem subject to increasingly severe regulation throughout the world.
"To meet the ambitious noise-reduction goals under discussion, a greatly enhanced understanding of the basic physics is needed," says Colonius. "Very large-scale computer simulations and follow-up analyses will bring us much closer to the goal of discovering the subtle physical mechanisms responsible for the radiation of jet noise and allow us to develop methods for suppressing it."
Colonius received $987,032 in ARRA funds from the National Science Foundation.
Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics, received his ARRA funds to explore the application of neurotechnologies to solving real-life economic problems.
"Our project, with my Caltech colleague Antonio Rangel, will explore the psychological and neural correlates of value and decision-making and their use in improving the efficiency of social allocations," says Camerer.
Camerer and his colleagues previously found that they could use information obtained through functional magnetic resonance imaging measurements to develop solutions to economic challenges.
Rangel, an associate professor of economics, has a second ARRA-funded project to analyze the neuroeconomics of self-control in dieting populations.
"Funding of this nature is critical to much of the work we do here at Caltech," adds Chameau. "And with ARRA support, dramatic discoveries may be just around the corner."
For a complete list of ARRA projects, visit: http://www.recovery.gov
Caltech is recognized for its highly select student body of 900 undergraduates and 1,200 graduate students, and for its outstanding faculty. Since 1923, Caltech faculty and alumni have garnered 32 Nobel Prizes and five Crafoord Prizes.
In addition to its prestigious on-campus research programs, Caltech operates the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the W. M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, the Palomar Observatory, and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Caltech is a private university in Pasadena, California. For more information, visit http://www.caltech.edu.
Written by Jon Weiner