While the new US administration is trying to optimize governmental spending, I have been asking myself for years: Is research grant money a good investment of taxpayers’ money?
The problem is that I have often heard announcements like “Congratulations to Dr. X, who received a grant for [the amount, typically hundreds of thousands or millions] from the agency Y.” However, I never heard any announcement that somebody (within the CEAS) made an important discovery, received groundbreaking results, or made an important invention because of getting that money. Therefore, my instinctive inclination will be to say, “No, grants are a waste of agencies’ money.” Moreover, many of them are distributed based on personal connections to program officers in the agencies and on other factors that have nothing to do with the scientific merit of the research.
However, the reality may be more complicated. In fact, some discoveries were made in the CEAS. In 2016, Ms. Laura Otto (a communication specialist and journalist from CEAS Dean’s Office) prepared a list of 10 scientific and engineering breakthroughs of CEAS with the title “10 ways UWM engineers improved Milwaukee and the world” https://uwm.edu/news/10-ways-milwaukee-engineers-improve-milwaukee-and-the-world/
The list includes successful CEAS alumni: Nobel Prize winning Dr. Jack Kilby, who was a Master’s student at UWM, Mr. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, a sport racer (NASCAR) Alan Kulwicki, a president of a local construction company Graef, a vice-president of GE Health, the Wisconsin Secretary of Transportation of 2016. Besides these six achievers, there are four CEAS professors on the list.
My hit parade of the most important discoveries and inventions made in CEAS would look slightly different:
1. In 1971, Dr. Robert Balmer discovered experimentally a new type of instability in fluid mechanics, which he called “hygrocyst” (“water cell”). He published a paper in nature about it: “The Hygrocyst–a Stability Phenomenon in Continuum Mechanics” https://www.nature.com/articles/227600a0 . There is only a handful of types of classical instabilities (the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability, etc.) Discovering a new type of mechanical instability is a fundamental discovery in mechanics and mathematics.
2. Metal-Matrix Composites (MMC) is an important class of composite materials. They were studied by various materials scientists, but Prof. Pradeep Rohatgi, who has studied MMCs at UWM for decades, is one of the pioneers of the new area.
3. Graphene Monoxide (GMO) is a new 2D material which was discovered by UWM researchers in the 2010s.
4. Nano-concrete (concrete with nanoparticle additive) was invented and studied by Prof. Konstantin Sobolev at UWM for many years. While other groups in the world investigate applications of nanotechnology to concrete, Prof. Sobolev is among pioneers of the area.
5. Nanotube-based sensors studied by Prof. Junhong Chen (he left UWM in 2019).
6. Prof. Deyang Qu’s work on Li batteries, in particular, first observations of fundamental chemical mechanisms in novel lithium-sulfur batteries.
7. Self-cleaning, self-lubricating, ice-phobic, anticorrosive, and self-healing smart materials studied by Profs. Rohatgi, Amano, Sobolev, Niu, and others.
So, the grants received by CEAS professors were not a 100% waste of money, because some important results were obtained. Interestingly, most of these discoveries are in the materials science (today, administrators who attack engineering research want to close the program and department of Materials Science and Engineering). However, most important results are achieved without money.
Clifford Truesdell, who was the greatest American mechanician of the last century, considered Mechanics a part of “Small Science” (as opposed to Big Science): “Small science was done by a few great men. Big science calls for many little men.” Most money is spent on Big Science, while most intellectual merit is found in Small Science.
Mathematical and theoretical research is cheap, and it results in the best cost-to-benefit ratios. Those administrators who are interested in achieving high prestige and intellectual merit while saving money should support theoreticians and engineers involved in applied mathematical research.