Since 2019, Penn State’s College of Engineering has received over $500 million in external grants and awards from research projects in its 13 departments.
During the last fiscal year, the college received $132.4 million of those grants.
These grants and awards have come from a variety of sources, including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Defense, according to George Lesieutre, associate dean for research and graduate programs at the Office of Engineering Research Administration.
Lesieutre said the college receives around 600 new research awards each year out of the 1,000 proposals sent out.
“In the same timeframe that we've recorded these $500 million, over roughly five years, the proposals we sent out probably had a face value of about $2 billion,” Lesieutre said.
The success the college has seen over these past years has multiple explanations, Lesieutre said, including a growth in faculty members, especially those earlier on in their careers.
“We've actually supported those faculty members with investments of internal funds. I think we've hired great people; we've made some investments in them, encouraged them to collaborate with others,” Lesieutre said.
Assistant professor Amrita Basak gave a lot of credit back to OERA and the Office of Sponsored Programs, which helps manage proposals throughout the entire process, from drafting to managing awarded funds if they’re won.
“When you watch a movie, you only see the actors and actresses, but you do not see all the people who are actually working behind the scenes,” Basak said. “These grants are sort of like a reflection of a collective effort — there are many, many, many people who are supporting us in many different ways.”
Lesieutre also gave credit to this staff.
“We have people who are experts in putting together proposals. We have people who are experts in working with agencies to make sure we're reporting well, that we're spending this funding responsibly and according to applicable laws,” Lesieutre said.
This growth in staff and support from proposal management experts has led to the growth for the College of Engineering, Lesieutre said.
“In the 2018 fiscal year, we had about $85 million in external research awards. In fiscal year 2022, that number was more like $130 million,” Lesieutre said.
Basak joined the college in 2019 and is part of the mechanical engineering department, currently researching additive manufacturing materials and processes. Basak’s research has received grants from NASA, the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Program to name a few.
Without these grants, research would be impossible because of how expensive it can get, Basak said. Each individual specimen scanned costs Basak’s lab $200, along with supporting students, costs can add up, she said.
“Currently my lab has one [postdoctoral], seven Ph.D. students, five master’s students and a bunch of undergraduates,” Basak said. “We won't be able to support all those students if we did not have money, and without them, we cannot do any work.”
This money has been immensely beneficial to the college with large portions of the funds going to graduate student support, often covering tuition, Lesieutre said.
One of Basak’s graduate students, Nandana Menon, said she’s been supported this way.
“It's definitely helped me a lot. My financial aid has been completely from the college or from these grants. I've not had to spend any,” Menon (graduate-mechanical engineering) said, “which was a great motivation for me to do my research and Ph.D. at Penn State.”
Menon also had her travel expenses for a conference she attended in Austin, Texas, covered, along with equipment she uses in research.
“I know people who are not funded at other institutes — they thought I would have to have a part-time job as well as doing research or even teaching assistantships, which pulls time away from your research,” Menon said. “It's been, thankfully, easier, since I've been funded from the beginning. I've been able to put complete focus on my research.”
Menon said she thinks the college being granted so much funding is a great incentive for future students to choose Penn State.
Lesieutre said he feels the funding has enabled the college to make an impact and “advance the state of the art.”
“One of the biggest ways we have an impact is sending these graduate students off into their own careers. They take what they've learned here and the experience they've had in the laboratories,” Lesieutre said. “It's kind of a huge multiplicative effect.”
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