Science Market Update

The University of Alabama is an unexpected standout in the science research marketplace.  This campus ranks among the top in the nation, flanking closely with the top NIH funded universities, and yet there is surprisingly little sales rep traffic on campus.

One of the ways to encourage companies to invest in research is to offer them a tax credit incentive, and that's exactly what many states do, including, soon, Alabama.  If the company does their own research, they get one tax break, but if they have it done by a public research institution like the University of Alabama, they get a much larger break: 15% under Alabama's proposed new law. That's good news for UAB, UAT, and other major research campuses in the state. And the rate may be even higher if Alabama tries to match North Carolina's incentive, which just went up to 20%.

Catastrophe has a way of catalyzing need and resources.  The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has made University of Alabama (UAB) scientists' expertise in the biomarine environment off their coast particularly valuable.  BP has pledge up to $500 Million to study the effects of the spill, and some of that funding is making its way to biomarine research projects at UA-Birmingham through Alabama's Marine Environmental Science Consortium (MESC) and the larger Gulf Research Initiative Open Research Program.  The MESC has distributed $5 Million in Rapid Response Funds already, and 16 UAB researchers have received $308,344 in grants to fund pilot projects identified by and applied for at the UAB Gulf Oil Spill Summit last fall.