A rickety economy has not stopped UF from spending about $584 million on science and engineering research in the 2008 fiscal year, earning the university a spot in the nation's top 20 in terms of research funding.
Even still, UF looks a little stingy compared to its spending the previous year.
2. University of California, San Francisco
3. University of Wisconsin, Madison
4. University of Michigan
5. University of California, Los Angeles
6. University of California, San Diego
7. Duke University
8. University of Washington
9. University of Pennsylvania
10. Ohio State University
11. Pennsylvania State University
12. Stanford University
13. University of Minnesota
14. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
15. Cornell University
16. University of California, Davis
17. University of Pittsburgh
18. University of California, Berkeley
19. University of Florida
20. Texas A&M University
According to the National Science Foundation, UF's spending decreased by about $9 million from the 2007 fiscal year.
UF is ranked 19th in the nation, according to the foundation.
John "Row" Rogacki, director of the UF Research and Engineering Education Facility, credits the university's reputation for the amount of funding it received.
"The university has a very strong reputation, and we work very hard at what we do, competing for and winning grants and contracts," Rogacki said. "It really speaks highly of our people."
Rogacki described the process to receive funds as cutthroat, often weeding out good ideas along the way.
"It's a competition," Rogacki said. "There are more good ideas than there is money to fund those good ideas."
Rogacki said REEF's current research agenda includes computation energetics and computation mechanics, studies that focus on munition innovation.
"With computers, we can design explosives that are safer to handle and more effective," Rogacki said.
To receive funding, researchers and their teams often have to send out extensive proposals to the agencies soliciting ideas.
"Almost all research gets funded by someone else," Rogacki said. "But it's funded on a competitive basis, and there are a lot of good universities out there."
One university is the University of South Florida. Ranked a distant second in the state behind UF, The Tampa Tribune reported the foundation's estimate of about $278 million allocated to research spending at the university.
Rogacki welcomes the competition.
"I don't view USF or other universities as threats," he said. "I think certainly for the good of the nation, the more researchers we have, the better off we're going to be."
Rogacki applies the same mindset to other universities, crediting the competitive nature of research funding as creative fuel.
"When someone like UCF or USF or FSU or any other university gets better, they force us to get better," Rogacki said. "We welcome their competition, and we appreciate the contribution they make."
