UCI to Share in $300-Million Grant

Gov. Gray Davis on Thursday awarded $300 million to three new University of California research institutes--including a joint UC Irvine/UC San Diego project on telecommunications--that will expand the frontiers of science and technology.

“It’s hard to contain my enthusiasm for what the governor has done here,” said Bill Parker, UCI associate vice chancellor. “It’s probably the most significant event in the history of the campus in advancing the research mission in one step.”

Davis called the California Institutes of Science and Innovation the state’s “most ambitious scientific research initiative” and said his goal is to “duplicate the rich collaboration between academia and industry that led to the Silicon Valley.”

UCI is the junior partner in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, with two-thirds of the money going to UC San Diego and the remainder to UCI.

The institute will make it much easier for UCI to attract the faculty and graduate students that make a university’s reputation. About 50 UCI faculty and 150 graduate students are expected to work with the center, Parker said.

“When we talk to faculty about coming to UCI, this will provide instant recognition,” he said.

High-tech and biotech industries have radically restructured the state’s economy, helping pull California out of a recession and infusing it with high-paying jobs in businesses that would have sounded like science fiction a mere decade ago.

“Who knows what breakthroughs will come?” Davis said. “We believe that these three institutes will invest in the 21st century and create the same dividends that Stanford Research Institute and Stanford did when it helped spawn the Silicon Valley.”

Picking from six finalists, Davis also selected proposals from UCLA and UC Santa Barbara to explore nanotechnology, or the art of building tiny structures an atom at a time. His third pick was a proposal from UC San Francisco, in collaboration with UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, to develop new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease by infusing engineering, physics and other scientific disciplines with medical research.

Davis followed the recommendations of a panel of experts that included the president of Scripps Research Institute, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Stanford’s president.

The panel was also intrigued by a fourth proposal by Berkeley to fortify the state’s patchwork quilt of communications so it could stand up to earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Acting upon the panel’s suggestion, the governor said he will ask the Legislature to spend an additional $100 million to fund Berkeley’s proposed Center for Information Technology Research, which it hopes to launch in collaboration with UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and a yet-to-be-built 10th campus near Merced.

The state will provide each institute $25 million a year for four years. Each one is expected to raise at least an additional $200 million from private and federal sources.

As recommended by the panel, Davis rejected two other proposals: UCI’s Institute of Systems Biology, and UC Riverside’s Institute in Agricultural Genomics.

UCI officials considered the proposal a longshot. It would have created a center bringing together experts in math, science and engineering to study biological programs underlying disease.

The awards give a huge boost to UC efforts to join the rush of research universities into promising cross-disciplinary fields.

Stanford launched its Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences last year with a $150-million donation from Netscape co-founder Jim Clark. Caltech has a similar but smaller initiative.

Davis said he expects other states will follow California’s lead, especially since Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently urged members of the National Governors Assn. to invest in their research universities if they wanted their states to profit from the new economy.

Already, the University of California’s central office has received inquiries from Massachusetts, Connecticut and Michigan asking about the new collaboration between the state government and the universities, UC President Richard C. Atkinson said.

Most of the state funding to the institutes will be used to construct campus buildings and laboratories.

UCI will put up a $49-million building of 110,000 square feet.

Much of the operating funds will come from partnerships with a who’s who of high-tech companies.

Among the 43 companies that have pledged donations and research contracts to the UCI/UC San Diego institute are such local companies as Qualcomm Inc., Conexant Systems Inc. and Newport Corp., along with Sun Microsystems of Palo Alto, Microsoft Corp. in Washington state and Akamai Technologies in Massachusetts.

Business leaders said the institute would help their companies and the local economy.

“It [the UC San Diego/UCI institute] will now become a magnet to attract the best and brightest minds from around the country to study, do research and then move into the industrial complex and become employees of local companies, hopefully,” said Henry Samueli, co-founder of Broadcom, which has given the institute $3 million to start a Center of Pervasive Communications.

A decade ago, such cozy relations between universities and industry set off alarm bells. Some critics still warn that profit motives could distort lab results or discourage researchers from sharing information that might prove to be lucrative. “There are dangers, no one can deny that,” Atkinson said. “But we will institute policies and procedures to protect the vital interests of the public.”

Such worries in academia have been waning, particularly as patents from profitable ventures have become an important source of revenue. Last year, for instance, UC received $88.9 million in patent royalties. Universities around the nation racked up $576 million in royalties.