November 22, 2013 — “We’re in danger of closing,” said Molly Lutcavage, the [University of Massachusetts Large Pelagics Research Center's] director and research professor. “We’re in jeopardy of shutting our doors in June 2014 due to lack of funding opportunities.”
It doesn’t get any more stark than that.
As Lutcavage gazes off toward the horizon of 2014, she openly wonders what will come of the center and the phalanx of young doctoral and post-doctoral scientists lured by its highly regarded work, sterling reputation and its setting along the shores of America’s oldest seaport.
“We want to be in Gloucester,” she said. “This where our work is.”
But will they be able to stay as the current funding withers away?
Will they be able to remain within the embrace of UMass — which provides the Gloucester facility and little else financially — or be forced to seek sponsorship elsewhere, such as MIT or the University of New Hampshire, where the center actually began in 2003 and which is said to be interested in a reconciliation?
And even if Lutcavage manages to cobble together the approximately $1.3 million from state, federal, corporate and private sources needed to keep moving forward, can she do it before her half-dozen staff scientists and another half-dozen affiliated scientists scatter to the winds in search of opportunities elsewhere?
In that way, Lutcavage and the LPRC are running a race against the clock and doing so in a field populated with other publicly funded research facilities looking to root out every possible dollar. It is a race made even more complicated by its ever-changing course over a ever-shifting landscape.
Through much of its history, the LPRC has been funded with federal earmarks and line-item appropriations in the annual budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
From 2003 to the present, it received $11 million in federal appropriations, drawing $3 million in each of the peak years from 2004 to 2007.
Since 2007, it has largely relied on the competitive grants from NOAA and other university-based research programs, as well as assistance from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries after moving to Gloucester in 2011. It has also have benefited from almost $340,000 in private and corporate donations.
Largely, those funds have funded research by the LPRC and its scientists credited by NOAA and other influential international players such as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas for shedding enormous new light on the life, migration, maturation and breeding habits of large pelagics — such as bluefin and big-eye tuna, swordfish, leatherback turtles and various species of sharks.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times