Cuts in University research funding by the Department of Defense have hit institutions across the country hard in recent years.

However, the University had about $38 million in defense funded project expenditures in fiscal year 2005, including about $2 million in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding.

Defense funded project expenditures for 2004 were just over $39 million.

Defense funding in 2005 accounted for 13.2 percent of federally funded research at the University. This is a drop from 14 percent in 2004, and more than 20 percent in 1997 and 1998.

Vice Chancellor for Research Charles Zukoski said the University is addressing the decline in funding from the military, especially for basic research.

“Federal relations staff meet frequently with our elected officials to present the importance of long term fundamental research,” Zukoski said.

The University supports the work of numerous higher education associations to push for increased funding of basic research.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was founded in 1958 to act as the central research arm of the Department of Defense, aiming to accelerate the development of technologies that could benefit the military.

Until recently, the agency has funded fundamental or longer-term, riskier, research projects that appear to have only relatively remote military use, if any. Such projects would advance science or technology that may benefit society far more than it does the military.

The 2001 appointment of a new director, Anthony Tether, brought about a change in the way the agency evaluates proposals.

Tether’s position is that the agency does not fund fundamental research, but should instead focus on military applications of inventions and discoveries made by projects elsewhere.

Computer science researchers, those whose successes with the agency’s funding have been most pronounced, have been hit hard: the money granted to University researchers in the field dropped from $214 million in 2001 to $123 million in 2004.

The office of the vice chancellor for research at the University reported that in 2005 seven agency projects were active. The office was unable to provide information on which projects were pursuing basic research and which were applied projects. However, no projects appeared to have a purely military focus, although all appeared to be applied work.

The majority of grants were for projects in the department of electrical and computer engineering.