Quick Looks
UM research stats and stories
In fiscal year 2019, UM exceeded $100 million in research expenditures for the first time in its history. This fiscal year, UM reported $104.7 million in research expenditures to the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development survey. This is a 16% increase over the previous high of $90.6 million in FY2018 and a 90% increase from FY2014.
“This continued rise in the amount of funded research at UM is a testament to the hard work of our faculty, staff and students,” says Scott Whittenburg, UM vice president for research and creative scholarship and dean of the Graduate School. “These numbers indicate that UM continues on the path to achieve a Carnegie Research Very-High Activity or R1 ranking. The funding also underscores how research at UM provides an economic engine for our community and state.”
UM Research Highlights for Fiscal Year 2020 Include:
Total grant dollars spent: $104.7 million
Percentage increase since 2014: 90%
Total number of publications by UM researchers: 1,378
(Source: Web of Science. UM leads the state.)
UM national ranking for research impact: №38
(Source: CWTS Leiden Ranking 2020)
UM national ranking for multi-university collaboration: №8
(Source: CWTS Leiden Ranking 2020)
Notable Research Awards Received in FY20
As mountain watersheds store and release water, the Earth’s shape changes ever so subtly. The UM Department of Geosciences now can track those changes by GPS, thanks to a $1.4 million cut of a multi-institutional collaborative award from the National Science Foundation. The project is headed by UM Geosciences Assistant Professor Hilary Martens.
Andrew Wilcox, a UM professor and chair of the Department of Geosciences, was named a Fellow of the Geological Society of America this past year. This prestigious honor is awarded to geoscientists “in recognition of a sustained record of distinguished contributions to the geosciences and the Geological Society of America.”
NSF has awarded UM and partner institutions $740,000 to boost representation of American Indian and Alaska Native students in STEM disciplines and the workforce. UM will receive $236,000 to develop Native-based STEM education activities for K-12 and higher education students. Aaron Thomas, a UM chemistry researcher and director of UM Indigenous Research and STEM Education, is the principal investigator of the resulting program titled CIRCLES: Cultivating Indigenous Research Communities for Leadership in Education and STEM Alliance.
UM Communications Studies Professor Steven Yoshimura co-wrote a book titled “Communicating Revenge in Interpersonal Relationships,” which won the 2020 Book Award from the International Association for Relationship Research. The award-winner was published in 2018 with co-author Susan D. Boon. The award is given every two years by IARR, which includes membership from scientists and practitioners from across the social science disciplines.
Top Research Awards Earned in FY20
Robert Stenger, Family Medicine Residency of Western Montana, $8.5 million
Jay Evans, Center for Translational Medicine, $2.5 million
Ragan “Ray” Callaway, Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR), $2.4 million
Donald Loranger, Mansfield Center Defense Critical Language and Culture Program, $2 million
Jim Elser, Flathead Lake Biological Research Station, $1.5 million
Ryan Tolleson Knee, Center for Children, Families and Workforce Development, $1.5 million
Researchers With 15 or More Publications in 2019–20
Mark Hebblewhite, John Kimball, Jim Elser, Zachary Cheviron, Bret Tobalske, Ray Callaway, Andrij Holian, Andrew Larson, L. Scott Mills, Tom Martin and Rich Willy
Source: Web of Science
Success Abounds for UM Center for Translational Medicine in 2020
In the future, 2020 may become a byword for tough times. But for UM’s Center for Translational Medicine, it was a year of astonishing success.
Directed by Jay Evans, a UM researcher in biological sciences, the multidisciplinary research center helps University employees and students translate scientific discoveries to health care applications, which often have commercial potential. The team has grown from 15 people in January 2016, when the group first came to UM from GSK, to nearly 50 employees now, including students, staff and faculty. And there are plans for further growth going forward.
The good run started in April, when the center was awarded $2.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to identify and advance a COVID-19 vaccine candidate.
“When the call came from NIH in February to shift focus and develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, we quickly adjusted lower priority vaccine projects to focus our efforts on this urgent need,” Evans says. “We have identified several promising lead vaccine candidates that are rapidly advancing through safety and efficacy testing in SARS-CoV-2 challenge models.”
UM’s vaccine research is unique in its use of new adjuvants, which help boost the immune system’s response to vaccines and will increase the duration of protection against COVID-19.
The NIH award resulted from the combined efforts of Evans; Drs. David Burkhart and Hélène Bazin-Lee from the Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences; Dr. Kendal Ryter from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; and Dr. Steve Sprang from the Division of Biological Sciences. UM also partnered with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City to assist with the rapid advancement of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Then in August, the center’s vaccine work landed UM on a list from Successful Student titled “Best Universities Solving the Coronavirus Pandemic.” Other universities on the list included Harvard and Oxford.
“It was nice to be recognized in this way,” Evans says. “The COVID-19 pandemic has created terrible human and economic costs in 2020. But scientists around the world have mobilized for this fight, and it’s exciting to be working toward a possible solution.”
Based on early success and great progress, in September UM received an additional $1.2 million NIH award to expand the SARS-SoV-2 program.
But the best was yet to come. The center and its private-sector partner, Inimmune Corp., earned a five-year, $33.4 million award in September for the development and clinical trials of opioid vaccines.
It was the largest such award in UM history.
“This funding is an enormous boost to the research we’ve already done on the development of an opioid vaccine and is validation of our world-class research team at UM,” Evans says. “It will allow us to advance lead opioid vaccine candidates to Phase I human clinical trials and better understand the safety and efficacy of our vaccine adjuvants, which early research has shown will be needed to increase the quantity and quality of the anti-drug antibody response in people with opioid addictions.”
Scott Whittenburg, UM vice president for research and creative scholarship, says the award demonstrates UM’s continued commitment to using its research faculty and facilities to address problems of concern to the country and Montana.
“Drug addiction is an ongoing concern to the state, where roughly half of all deaths from drug overdoses are due to opioids,” Whittenburg says. “The development of an adjuvant vaccine for treatment of opioid addiction is key to overcoming a major health issue for the state.”
Climate Office Earns $21 Million for Remote Weather Stations
The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a $21 million contract to the Montana Climate Office at UM to install weather stations for monitoring snowpack and soil moisture in the Upper Missouri River Basin.
Under the contract, UM researchers will install these new weather stations in central and eastern Montana — east of the Rocky Mountain front in the Upper Missouri River Basin — an area notoriously underrepresented and undermeasured when it comes to climate data.
“If you look at a map of snowpack, we all think of the mountains in western Montana. There isn’t a lot of snow in our plains. It’s not that it doesn’t occur, it’s that we don’t have data. That’s a problem,” says Kelsey Jencso, an associate professor of hydrology in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation and the Montana state climatologist. “That area is sparsely populated, but what happens there has a big impact hydrologically downstream.”
The new stations measure weather variables, including relative humidity, temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction, snowpack height, and snow and rainfall depths. Below ground, they also measure soil water content at multiple depths, soil temperature and soil water electrical conductivity as a proxy of water quality.
Measurements are collected every five minutes and are shared with key federal agencies and can be viewed online by the public. That data will be used by federal agencies to help with flood control and can also be used by state agencies to help improve drought monitoring, agricultural production and fire preparedness.
Soil moisture and snowpack are key drivers of drought and flooding in the Upper Missouri River Basin, but they are difficult to measure. The new stations were designed specifically to provide the data needed by snow modelers and river forecasters to improve products that inform reservoir management.
Partnership Grows COVID-19 Testing Capacity for Montana
As demand for COVID-19 testing increases across Montana, UM has launched a new partnership with the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services to process COVID-19 tests on campus.
The partnership between UM and DPHHS provides the state of Montana with more COVID-19 testing capacity at this critical time.
“UM is eager to expand our public health partnership to best serve our students and the state of Montana,” UM President Seth Bodnar says. “I give special thanks to everyone at UM and in Helena who worked so hard to put this agreement in place. Going forward, UM is now in position to add critical capacity to our state’s robust testing efforts.”
UM has worked closely with DPHHS to secure the additional equipment and Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification needed to process COVID-19 tests on campus. UM researchers began processing COVID-19 tests in October at the UM Genomics Core.
“I am grateful to our UM faculty, staff and students for adapting
so quickly to fill this need and fulfill our responsibility as Montana’s research university,” says Scott Whittenburg, UM vice president for research and creative scholarship. “As a result of their hard work, once we ramp up UM will be able to process up to 2,000 COVID-19 tests a week for the state.”
UM Receives $10M for Population Health Research Center
As emergent pathogens like coronavirus and climate-related health challenges like wildfire smoke plague human populations, UM has received funding for a center dedicated to understanding and addressing public health challenges to Montana and the region.
The National Institutes of Health awarded the University a five-year, $10.75 million grant to establish the Center for Population Health Research (CPHR, pronounced “see-far”). The center will support epidemiological and mathematical modeling approaches to better understand risk and resilience factors for children’s health outcomes. It also will create disease prevention strategies developed for, adapted to and tested in rural communities.
“We are excited about this opportunity to improve the health of children in Montana and the region,” says Curtis Noonan, center director and a professor of epidemiology in UM’s School of Public and Community Health Sciences. “This comes at a challenging time for the public health community.
“We could not have predicted the current coronavirus threat when we started building this center over two and a half years ago,” he says, “but we did recognize the importance of developing the capacity to work with medical and public health data to better understand health risk in our communities and identify disease prevention strategies that are relevant to rural states.”
A key feature of CPHR is to provide core resources to support both current and future researchers who explore important population health questions. The Data and Modeling Core, led by Jon Graham, provides center researchers with tools and infrastructure for working with sensitive electronic data such as medical records and state health tracking systems.
CPHR resources and research projects provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students to engage in cutting-edge, NIH-funded research.
Archaeologists, Businesses Partner to Reveal Forgotten Past
UM archaeology students and researchers have discovered artifacts in downtown Missoula that illuminate the lives of people from more than a century ago.
The finds were made during construction for a new brewery and pub on the 200 block of West Main Street. UM alumni Jed and Jennifer Heggen, owners of the Cranky Sam Public House, partnered this past summer with a team that included UM archaeology graduate students Nikki Manning and Kate Kolwicz. They salvaged artifacts uncovered during construction work.
The Heggens had unexpectedly found themselves atop a major archaeological site that was in the heart of Missoula’s red-light district and Chinese community from about 1880 to the early 1920s. Red-light districts and “Chinatowns” were found in many towns across the American West.
While research shows that the area was connected with the Chinese population, it also was the neighborhood of “female boarding houses” — a euphemism for prostitution that included brothels and one-room cribs.
“The site has turned up thousands of artifacts,” Kolwicz says. “We have found intact liquor, beer and medicine bottles, ceramics, countless ceramic sherds and glass shards. We also found artifact types associated with the Chinese specifically, such as Chinese-made ceramics, pill vials associated with Chinese traditional medicine, opium paraphernalia and Chinese game pieces and coins. Artifacts associated with prostitution also were collected at the site, including perfume bottles, feminine hygiene products and cosmetic jars.”
UM Researcher Among the World’s Most Cited
The Web of Science Group compiles an annual list of the top 0.1% most highly cited researchers in the world. In both 2019 and 2020, only one scientist in Big Sky Country made the cut: Dr. Bob Yokelson, a research professor at UM who studies the chemistry of smoke.
Yokelson is a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He examines biomass burning worldwide and its role in air quality, atmospheric chemistry and climate.
“Fires are one of the major influences on the global atmosphere,” he says. “I decided 25 years ago to deploy advanced technology around the world to measure the chemistry of fresh smoke and how it evolves. I think this award validates the importance of our results, and it’s definitely a group achievement made possible with my collaborators and the excellent graduate students and postdoctoral scholars on our team.”
The Web of Science Group is an information and technology provider for the global scientific research community. The organization recorded that, as of November 2020, 125 Yokelson publications had been cited 9,286 times.
Famed Biologist Earns Montana’s Highest Professor Rank
Dr. Douglas Emlen, a UM biology professor whose work on the development and evolution of animal weaponry has garnered international acclaim, recently was named a Regents Professor of Evolutionary Biology.
Regents Professor is the highest faculty rank bestowed by the Montana University System. Emlen’s new honor was approved by the state Board of Regents. He is the 13th UM faculty member to earn the professor rank since it was established in 1991.
“You know, I once had a class of biology students give me a standing ovation at the end of a semester, and that might be my most amazing award,” Emlen says. “But this is definitely right up there.”
The son of a scientist, Emlen earned his doctorate from Princeton University in 1994 and was a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University before joining the UM faculty in 1994.
Emlen’s research has focused on why certain animal species get into evolutionary arms races that result in massive weaponry, like the (relatively) huge horns of many beetles, the antlers of elk, the claws of fiddler crabs or the teeth of saber-toothed tigers.
With one of his first study species, dung beetles, Emlen learned that weaponry like bigger horns usually provide the most access to females, as big-horned males guard tunnels to their mates. Bigger horns usually win beetle battles. However, evolving massive horns eats up resources, and some smaller, faster males of the same species will forgo this cost altogether to reach females via side tunnels and pass on their genes. So bigger is usually better, but evolution makes exceptions.
In 2016, Emlen became the first researcher from any Montana institution to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the greatest honors available to American scholars. He earned a Presidential Early Career Award in 2002, the E.O. Wilson Naturalist Award in 2013 and UM’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014. He was named the Montana Professor of the Year in 2015 from the Carnegie Foundation and Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Emlen also is an accomplished author. His book “Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle” earned the Phi Beta Kappa science book of the year in 2015. The textbook he co-wrote, “Evolution: Making Sense of Life,” is used by more than 250 universities and colleges and is in its third edition.
Glimpse
Deena Mansour, executive director of UM’s Mansfield Center, was part of a team that received a $4.2 million U.S. State Department award to support international civic engagement efforts. The funding will support the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative, which brings emerging leaders from 11 countries in Southeast Asia to the U.S. and UM. The program also sends U.S. Fellows to Asia in a reciprocal program.
___________________________________
The American Council of Learned Societies has named Rosalyn LaPier, a UM associate professor and environmental researcher, a 2020 Fellow in its program on religion, journalism and international affairs. LaPier is the first UM faculty member in 17 years to earn a fellowship from this prestigious organization.
___________________________________
UM scientist Monica Serban is on a research roll. In 2020, the UM associate professor and her team have earned three awards totaling $3.9 million in funding to study preventing hearing loss among U.S. troops, combating ear infections and creating a synthetic skin product.
___________________________________
A grant-writing partnership between UM’s Center for Children, Families and Workforce Development and the state has yielded rich results — almost $16 million in new grants to fund programs to support children and families across Montana. Headwaters Foundation provided the funding for the center’s grant-writing team.
___________________________________
The Center for Children, Families and Workforce Development also developed an innovative program connecting incarcerated fathers with their children. It is one of the first of its kind in Montana and nationwide. CAMPP (Connecting Adults and Minors through Positive Parenting), is being piloted in the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.
___________________________________
Recent research from UM suggests tropical songbirds in both the Old and New Worlds reduce reproduction during severe droughts, and this — somewhat surprisingly — may actually increase their survival rates. The work was published Aug. 24 in the journal Nature Climate Change by UM research scientist Thomas Martin and doctoral student James Mouton.
___________________________________
UM’s spectrUM Discovery Area has received a $671,000 National Leadership Grant for Museums from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. During the three-year project, the science education center will develop a mobile making-and-tinkering exhibition, as well as an education program that will travel to rural and tribal Montana communities to engage K-12 students and educators with hands-on problem-solving and design. •
