UC Santa Cruz among top five institutions seeing growth in NIH funding

UC Santa Cruz is in the top five of institutions that have seen significant increases in funding from the National Institutes of Health over the past decade.

At the same time a number of other institutions have suffered sizeable drops.

According to "Science Squeezed," a series of reports on biomedical funding by NPR, NIH funding soared between 1998 and 2003, which created a gold-rush mentality in biomedicine. But since 2004, the NIH budget has dropped by more than 20 percent (not including federal stimulus money during 2009 and 2010).

According to the report, UC Santa Cruz has seen NIH funding increase from about $14 million in 2000 to almost $30 million in 2013. The campus is one of 10 universities that have enjoyed increased funding. In contrast, another group of universities, many with previous funding totals in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, have seen sizeable drops.

The reports by NPR science correspondent and UC Santa Cruz alumnus Richard Harris (Crown, '80, biology) include a searchable graphic that lists all NIH funding to institutions over the past 14 years.