Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) is no new research area, however, it currently experiences a renaissance because more and more high-frequency terahertz (THz) instrumentation. became available in recent years. This progress can be monitored by the amount of money that the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) spent on DNP research in recent years.
Over the last decade, the two government agencies NIH and NSF spent a total of more than 59 M$ on DNP research and DNP related topics. While the funding amount between the years 2000 and 2005 is almost constant (average of 2.9 M$/yr), with no significant contribution by the NSF, funding level significantly increased over the last five years. So far 2010 has been the year with the highest funding rate ever, with almost 14 M$ spent on DNP research.
The majority of the money went into individual research grants such as NIH’s R01 grants. However, in recent years more projects were funded using the NIH S10 (shared instrumentation) or P41 (center grant) funding mechanisms, indicating that a significant portion was spent on turn-key instrumentation as supposed to individual research grants.
Finally, the majority of the 59 M$ dollars went to institutions in Massachusetts (34.2 M$, 58 %) and California (7.7 M$, 13%).
These data are available free of charge from the NIHReporter or the NSF funding database. The raw data of this study are available upon request.