Administrators at Central Michigan Unversity said they’re hoping the record-breaking grants will help boost enrollment and attract faculty.
The university received $5 million more than their last record set a decade ago, said David Weindorf, vice president for research and innovation at CMU.
“When we have really good news like this, we need to celebrate this because it is something everyone helped to contribute towards," he said. "It’s been a collective effort of faculty, staff, students—everyone working together to achieve this new milestone for the university.”
STEM fields received more money overall than humanities because of higher costs, Weindorf said. But research opportunities were spread relatively evenly between the two, he said.
More money was being given to researchers at CMU, and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
"People ask: why do things fall off like that when we have COVID?" Weindorf said. "Well, realize when we have travel restrictions, meetings are being cancelled, people aren’t going out to the field to collect data points--there were just delays, right, in getting a lot of that research completed which is why expenditures went down in a lot of those specific years."
During 2021-2022, CMU researchers received $26.3 million to grants and contracts. The last record was during 2010-2011, with $20.8 million.