Mitchison and his team received a $999,932 grant from NIH in September to investigate which cancer drugs will be successful early in their development.

According to the stipulations of the grant, he will be required to submit quarterly progress reports, detailing the number of jobs created and saved and how he is spending the stimulus funds.

“It’s an unusual degree of scrutiny, but positive scrutiny,” Mitchison says.

To help Harvard researchers navigate the process of applying for and spending stimulus funds, Harvard’s first Vice Provost for Research David Korn ’54 and his staff launched a site with up-to-date information on new grants as they became available over the summer.

By October, Harvard had submitted more than 700 grant proposals—about 200 of which were awarded, totaling roughly $154 million.

“I don’t think I’ve had a direct, active role,” Korn says. “[The faculty] have to write the grants and go through a stringent peer review, but I think Harvard has done extremely well in the number of grants received.”

Harvard’s peer research institutions also took their share of the federal funds, with Johns Hopkins University receiving $160.3 million, Yale taking home $121 million, and Stanford netting $119 million.

SAVING JOBS

For Juraj Farkas and Shichun Huang, research associates at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, the jobs preserved by the stimulus funds are their own.

With a $53,000 grant from NSF, the pair embarked on their first independent research project in Sept. 2009. Using Harvard’s million-dollar mass spectrometer, they are studying calcium isotopes in rocks in order to better understand geological history.

Unlike many tenured professors, research associates—a position equivalent to a postdoctoral fellow—typically do not have a continuous stream of funding. Farkas says that obtaining grants as a junior researcher has always been difficult, but the stimulus package presented a unique opportunity.

“It’s always been hard to get funded,” Huang says. “We have to show them we’re able to do this.”

MOVING FORWARD

Astronomy professor Jonathan E. Grindlay was pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call in September notifying him of a $772,000 NSF grant award—$231,000 more than he asked for.

Grindlay had sought funding to digitize glass plate images of stars held at the Harvard Observatory—a project that will ultimately require $3 or 4 million, he says.