Southern Miss Ranks Among Top 50 in Chemical Research and Development
Thu, 12/15/2011 - 01:15pm | By: Van Arnold
No other Mississippi university receives more federal funding for chemical research and development or spends more on those initiatives than The University of Southern Mississippi, according to a report published by Chemical & Engineering News.
The study included data provided by the National Science Foundation, comparing figures between 1999 and 2009. The latest figures show that Southern Miss ranks No. 33 among universities receiving the most federal funding for chemical research and development and No. 44 for spending in those same areas.
“The take-home message from this report is that we are the only school in Mississippi to achieve this ranking. Also, we are ranked along with some of the best universities in the United States,” said Dr. Doug Masterson, associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Southern Miss. “Additionally, if you look at schools from the traditional ‘Deep South' you will see there are only a handful that made the list.”
Those universities would include Florida, Florida State, LSU, Emory, Georgia Institute of Technology and South Carolina. Southern Miss ranks higher in both categories than prestigious universities such as the University of Southern California, University of Kansas, Notre Dame and Florida State.
Figures from 2009 show that Southern Miss received $9.76 million in federal funding – primarily through national grant awards -- for chemical research and development. During that same period Southern Miss spent $11.9 million on chemical research and development.
“Our faculty have been very successful in obtaining competitive funding from federal agencies,” said Dr. Sabine Heinhorst, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Southern Miss. “That success is a reflection of the quality of research that is being pursued in our department specifically, and more broadly, in the chemical sciences at Southern Miss.”
To learn more about the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Southern Miss call 601.266.4701 or visit http://www.usm.edu/chemistry-biochemistry. To see the full list of C&EN rankings, visit http://cen.acs.org/index.html