UTA federal research projects add $38M to economy

Tuesday, Mar 19, 2024 • Katherine Egan Bennett : contact

The economic impact of federally sponsored research at The University of Texas at Arlington was $38 million in 2022, with expenditures spread among 725 unique vendors, according to a new report. Of that total, the University spent about $24 million on research-related goods and services in Texas.

The research dollars also supported the salaries of 1,562 people during this time—including 517 faculty and 746 students.

“Research at UTA helps solve some of society’s most important problems, and it is also a vital economic driver in our economy and in the careers of our students and researchers,” said Kate Miller, vice president of research and innovation. “We’re proud that UTA’s collaborations with private and public research organizations led to the purchase of new scientific equipment and technology that has such an economic impact on our region.”

According to the report produced by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), the top federal agencies supporting UTA research are the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce.

In the past five years, UT Arlington has purchased research-related goods and services from vendors located in all 38 of Texas’ federal congressional districts.

“Our reports clarify and explain the economic impact of university research through many different lenses,” said IRIS Executive Director Jason Owen-Smith, a professor of sociology and executive director for research analytics at the University of Michigan. “Through these data-driven reports, our goal is to better understand, explain and ultimately improve the public value of higher education and research.”

This report is based on administrative data UTA supplied to IRIS, which was then merged with other public and private datasets. Reports are available to IRIS members. No individual businesses, employees or students are identifiable in the reports.

Nearly 500 researchers from more than 100 institutions have accessed IRIS data through its virtual data enclave, and more than 40 published papers and three books have used the data. IRIS is a national consortium of research universities organized around an institutional review board-approved data repository, housed at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.