For the 13th straight year, UCSD broke the $1 billion mark, pulling in $1.64 billion — $100 million more than it received a year earlier.
The university averaged roughly $5 million a day in new money, keeping it among the 10 largest research schools in the country.
UCSD received hundreds of millions of dollars in health and medicine related studies, including grants to explore and fight COVID-19, which has killed more than 1 million people in the U.S. since early 2020.
The campus also got $25.6 million from the National Science Foundation to look for better ways to integrate different sources of energy — including solar panels and wind turbines — into power grids. The school has become a test bed for such research.
And UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography received $11.2 million from the Defense Department to upgrade and improve computing, instrumentation and labs aboard the research ships it operates. The vessels are used across broad areas of science, including studying the health of the fish and shrimp industries, movement along sub-sea earthquake faults, and how something as wispy as sea spray influences global temperatures.
SDSU obtained $164.5 million for research, a roughly $23 million increase over the previous year. The figure is small compared to UCSD. But SDSU is part of the California State University system, which prioritizes teaching over research. SDSU has turned itself into something of a hybrid, doing both. It leads the CSU in research funding.
The campus got $32.8 million from the National Institutes of Health and $13 million from the National Science Foundation. That money and other funds helped SDSU study how to fight the spread of COVID-19 in schools, look for ways to protect water resources, and develop more effective means for curtailing tobacco use.
SDSU researchers also got money to explore how soil microbes can both produce and absorb greenhouse gasses, an area of study that's considered vital to dealing with climate change.
The school faces challenges in greatly expanding upon its current funding. Graduate students are essential to major research programs. And SDSU's number of grad students fell from 6,253 in 2009 to 4,739 last year. The school also says it needs a major new science building.
This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune.
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