February 8, 2010

108 jobs created by ARRA funding; all will be filled soon

One year ago this month, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a legislative initiative designed to stimulate domestic spending and create jobs by pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy. Millions of those dollars have landed at Johns Hopkins and are being put to use on groundbreaking research projects.

Since ARRA was enacted, the university has received more than 340 stimulus-funded research grants and supplements totaling more than $160.3 million from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The grants were selected from among about 1,300 Johns Hopkins proposals for investigations ranging from efforts to find more cost-effective ways to treat heart failure patients to looking into ways to better treat patients with such debilitating conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, progeria and schizophrenia.

To date, the stimulus-related investigations by university scientists have resulted in the creation of 108 staff jobs, 81 of which have been filled and 27 of which are in the process of being filled. These positions do not include jobs that were saved when other grants ran out, and do not include faculty and graduate student positions supported by ARRA grants.