Duke University Year In Review - The Rise of Research

1993: Duke establishes the Office of Science and Technology to oversee patenting and licensing of University technology, set up commercially sponsored research and develop new venture activity. By 2002 Duke discoveries, mainly biomedical, have spawned some 22 companies.
1994: The $80-million Levine Science Research Center opens, adding laboratories, faculty offices and classrooms and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between research and administrative units.
1995: The Duke Clinical Research Institute is launched to help investigators mount studies of new pharmaceuticals and other treatments. Unique among academic medical centers, the Institute has conducted studies at more than 3,120 sites in 59 countries, has over 5,000 investigators worldwide and has over 300,000 patients enrolled.
1999: Duke creates the Center for Instructional Technology to work with faculty and with academic and administrative departments across the university to effectively apply information technology in the classroom.
1999: Edmund T. Pratt Jr., the retired chairman and chief executive officer of Pfizer Inc., gives the second largest gift in university history--$35 million--to endow the Duke University School of Engineering, which is named in his honor. A year later, high-tech entrepreneur Michael J. Fitzpatrick and his wife, Patty, donate $25 million to the school to establish an innovative center for advanced photonics and communications.
2000: Trinity College of Arts and Sciences opens the Office of Undergraduate Research Support to coordinate and facilitate opportunities for undergraduate research. Since 1999, the number of funded programs to which Duke students may apply for research support has increased 67 percent. In 2003, 29 percent of the graduating class had been engaged in a mentored research experience while at Duke.
2000: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gives Duke a five-year, $1.5 million grant to fund a Summer Biomedical Science Institute that aims to increase the numbers of under-represented minorities in future medical school applicant pools. Duke provides an additional $2.8 million in funding for the program.
2001: Duke University Libraries surpasses the five-million-volume mark and trustees approve the Perkins Renovation, a major library expansion.
2001: Duke adopts Building on Excellence, a five-year, $700-million strategic plan which sets as institutional priorities the advancement of campus-wide initiatives in genomics, computational biology, neural analysis and engineering, photonics and communications, materials sciences and engineering, and environmental sciences and policy.
2002: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives Duke $30 million to support a new science facility and another $5 million for student life initiatives. The majority of the funds will help unite undergraduate instruction in the natural �life� sciences and hire excellent research and teaching faculty in these fields.

In recent years cranes and bulldozers have become as ubiquitous a sight on the Duke campus as gargoyles and Gothic arches�and nowhere are they more visible than along Research Drive. Last year alone, construction crews put the finishing touches on the $35-million Genome Sciences Research Building I, which will house the Center for Human Genetics, and the $41-million Genome Sciences Research Building II for the Center for Human Disease Models�both part of the university-wide Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. Duke also began building the $97-million, 320,000-square-foot Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences (CIEMAS), which will bring together Duke medical and engineering researchers to pursue advances in areas such as heart disease and cancer treatment, photonics and prosthetics after it opens in August 2004.

More than bricks and mortar, these new buildings are tangible signs of Duke�s investment in research and in our faculty. Over the past decade, Duke has not only built or broken ground on more than a half-dozen major research facilities, but launched sweeping research initiatives in such areas as genomics and photonics and committed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars raised through the Campaign for Duke for �advancing the quest for knowledge� and attracting top faculty researchers and teachers.

Such investments are reaping results. In 2002-2003, Duke achieved the highest rate of growth in NIH funding of the nation�s top 15 medical schools, attracting more than $245 million. Its medicine and biomedical engineering graduate programs were once again ranked among the top 10 in the nation by U.S.News & World Report. And numerous faculty researchers were elected to prestigious organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their contributions to research and to society. As these and other events of the decade illustrate, Duke�s standing in research is rising as fast as its new buildings.