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Research Fast Facts

FY 2012 Dashboard of Research Metrics

Recent OU Rankings

February 18, 2013

  • The Norman Campus now supports 135 postdoctoral fellows and an additional 140 non-faculty Ph.D. researchers with its centers and academic units.

June 12, 2012

  • The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration selected OU for renewal of its Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) agreement that will bring up to $75 million in federal funding to the University over the next five years. The center will continue to advance weather radar research, improve severe storm forecasting, and increase understanding of extreme weather and short-term regional climate. The agreement maintains current employment levels with the possibility of hiring additional employees. In FY11, 75 people received more than half of their support from NOAA-funded projects. In addition, 48 OU graduate students and 26 OU undergraduate students were supported through NOAA-funded projects.

  • The Department of Interior selected OU as one of only eight regional climate science centers nationwide. Led by Vice President for Weather and Climate Programs Berrien Moore III, OU will direct a South-Central Regional consortium that includes four universities, two tribal nations, and a national laboratory. The center will link weather and climate projections to decisions on federal lands and other natural resources in a study of the impacts of climate change. Ninety to 100 new jobs will be added to the Norman Campus with private spin-off employment likely to follow. The center increases to six the number of federally-funded centers on OU’s Norman campus. 

  • An OU research team from the Center for Applied Social Research, the Department of Communication, the K20 Center and the Michael F. Price College of Business was awarded a $10.7 million contract from Air Force in support of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop a training game for intelligence analysts. The researchers are Norah Dunbar (Communication), Matthew Jensen (Management Information Systems), Claude Miller (Communication) and Scott Wilson (K20 Center). The game seeks to improve accuracy of credibility assessments and mitigate cognitive biases of future intelligence analysts.

  • The K20 Center received a seven-year, $27 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR-UP) initiative with Oklahoma City Public Schools.

  • Andre Lessa, a former OU graduate student, won the first ever J.J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics from the American Physical Society. The award recognizes exceptional young scientists who have performed original doctoral thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of theoretical particle physics. Lessa investigated the consequences of dark matter models involving two different types of matter, which arise from a natural solution to two long-standing problems in particle physics.

  • Ingo Schlupp, Presidential Professor in the Department of Zoology, was awarded a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award is for scientists and scholars, internationally renowned in their field, who completed their doctorates less than 18 years ago and who in the future are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements which will have a seminal influence on their discipline beyond their immediate field of work.

  • Donna Nelson, professor of chemistry, received the 2012 Oklahoma Chemist Award, the most prestigious award given to chemists within Oklahoma by the five Oklahoma sections of the American Chemical Society. Nelson is only the third native Oklahoman and the second woman to receive the award. Nelson was recognized for her leadership in the nanosciences and the interface between science and public/governmental affairs.

  • Mukremin Kilic, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and his team have identified two white dwarf stars that are the oldest and closest stars known to man. Kilic's team found that they are 11 to 12 billion years old and only 100 light years away from the Earth. These stars are the closest known examples of the oldest stars in the Universe possibly formed soon after the Big Bang.

  • According to a 2011 article in Scientometrics, Lowell Busenitz, Michael F. Price Chair in Entrepreneurship, is one of the top 25 most cited entrepreneurship scholars in the world.

  • Jana Shen, assistant professor of chemistry, and Ben F. Holt, assistant professor of plant biology, won National Science Foundation CAREER awards in 2011 and 2012, respectively. The grant award is the NSF’s most prestigious honor in support of junior faculty in science and engineering.

  • Four OU faculty members were named Fulbright Scholars for the 2011-12 year. The scholars are Jason Paul Julian, Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability, Joan Elizabeth Phillips, Department of Art and Art History, Srividhya Ragavan, College of Law, and Zev Trachtenberg, Department of Philosophy.

  • Jennifer Saltzstein, assistant professor of musicology, won a residential research fellowship from the Huntington Library Foundation. The fellowship funded two-months of on-site research at the Huntington Library to support the publication of Saltzstein's book, The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Under contract with the Gallica Series, Boydell & Brewer).

  • Kianoosh Hatami and Brian Grady and former graduate student Matthew C. Ulmer received the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award, a prestigious honor in the field of geotechnical engineering, for their paper showing how a new generation of polymeric products used in geotechnical projects (called Sensor-Enabled Geosynthetics, or SEG) could help monitor deformations in such earthen structures as embankments and retaining walls as they happen.

  • Professors Kolar, Dresback, Hong, and Vieux teamed with researchers from the National Severe Storms Laboratory, University of North Carolina, and Louisiana State University to develop a prototype real-time modeling system that predicts total water levels (i.e. tides, waves, surge, runoff) along the North Carolina coast, which was evaluated during the 2011 hurricane season. The Department of Homeland Security utilized this system, developed with funding from Homeland Security and NOAA, in evacuating personnel and assets from North Carolina and other states during Hurricane Irene. It will be used in the current season as well.

  • Scott Hodgson, professor of broadcasting and electronic media, along with producer Chandra Clark of the University of Alabama and students from both universities, won a 2011 Telly Award for the documentary short “Tornado Emergency: Saving Lives.” The Telly is the premiere award honoring outstanding TV and web commercials, programs, and video and film productions.

  • Melissa K. Stockdale, associate professor of history, recently completed residency as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Stockdale won the highly prestigious fellowship to conduct research for her second book, “A Hard Country to Love:” Patriotism and National Identity in Russia’s Great War, 1914-1918.