Annual Report

New Faculty Hire Program

This seven-year grant of $5,481,051 provided FAU Harbor Branch a unique and competitive opportunity to recruit 8 new faculty/principal investigators by offering each three-year salary support and a major start-up package. As noted: “Investment in the faculty will transform Harbor Branch and provide substantial opportunities for collaboration across all of FAU. New faculty will also substantially increase our ability to contribute to the goal of doubling the research portfolio of FAU.” The grant was made to expand the faculty of Harbor Branch in key areas related to the initiatives:

• The Indian River Lagoon Observatory
• Ocean exploration platforms for the 21st century
• Integrated multi-trophic level aquaculture
•Advanced underwater sensory and communication technologies
• Core laboratory facilities for integrative molecular bioscience

Ensuring Faculty Excellence Grant

The total amount of this grant $1,734,750, was based on a three year projection of Faculty salaries and fringe benefits with a commitment to providing up to 20% of each faculty member’s salary and fringe benefits until funds were exhausted. As is typical for many educational research institutes, for FAU Harbor Branch, the salaries of the Faculty are a combination of institutionally-supported funding and externally-funded sponsored research grants. By providing the opportunity to earn 20% support from this grant, it was thought that this would further incentivize Faculty to excellence. The Harbor Branch Foundation intended for this salary support to be awarded through the development of specific criteria and made this grant contingent upon an understanding that any freed up dollars from the state-funded budget be reallocated within the FAU Harbor Branch institutionally-supported budget.

Incentive Program

Concurrent with the New Faculty Hire grant, this grant provided $1,465,000 over seven years at a designated pool of funds per year for incentive awards and grants. The purpose of this designated operational support was so that Harbor Branch could provide salary rewards and further incentivize current faculty by encouraging the faculty to win awards and other distinctions as well as secure additional external grants and publish and present at conferences to build a basis for FAU promotion. Rewards were retroactive regarding performance since joining FAU and an additional $400,000 was committed by the Harbor Branch Foundation over the life of the grant should any one year exceed that year’s pool allotment.

Ensuring a Robust Development Strategy for Harbor Branch

The Foundation Board voted in January 2014 to refrain from active fundraising, either on behalf of FAU Harbor Branch or the Foundation’s Endowment. Rather, the Board voted to provide a major Ensuring a Robust Development Strategy for HBOI grant to FAU Harbor Branch which would support the addition of a dedicated HBOI development staff of three based on a projection of salaries and fringe benefits for each over three years. The total amount of this award was $890,100.

This decision was based on the recommendation of an independent Organizational Analysis which noted that any development effort for HBOI should reside either exclusively at the Foundation or exclusively at FAU Harbor Branch so as not to be duplicative nor create inadvertent competition. The Harbor Branch Foundation may consider launching a capital campaign for its Endowment separate from or in conjunction with FAU at a future date and upon the satisfactory outcome of a feasibility study that demonstrates an available and cultivated donor pool for such a campaign exists.

The Indian River Lagoon Observatory

Since 2012, the Harbor Branch Foundation has hosted a signature event, Love Your Lagoon. With over $412,058 raised to date, each event has raised funds and generated greater awareness of the critical issues facing the Indian River Lagoon by supporting FAU Harbor Branch’s ongoing Indian River Lagoon Observatory research and outreach efforts.

2016 Indian River Lagoon Symposium
The Harbor Branch Foundation's Annual Love Your Lagoon Gala Dinner event was originally inspired to raise funds to raise awareness by mounting an Indian River Lagoon Symposium following the 2011-2012 algal blooms crisis. In 2016, the Foundation provided $10,000 towards this event. The Symposium is the result of a multi-institutional, multi-agency effort to provide a forum for discussing Indian River Lagoon science and its application to management of the Lagoon. The intent is to facilitate better communication among these groups so that the gaps between research and its application can be narrowed. Open to scientists, decision makers, students, education and outreach professionals, and the interested public, it draws over 600 participants over two days. 

2016 Indian River Lagoon Graduate Research Fellows Program
Proceeds from the 2016 event will fund the work of students involved in HBOI’s Indian River Lagoon Graduate Research Fellows program. The competitive process will result in support for salary, tuition, travel to present research, and/or materials necessary for the research project. Fellows will ultimately present their research at the Indian River Lagoon Symposium as well as at the FAU Charles E. Schmidt College of Science Graduate Research Day.

Connecting Users to IRL Data
In 2013, the Harbor Branch Foundation designated funds from the 2013 Love Your Lagoon Gala Dinner event to host two workshops to define national priorities for estuarine observing systems and regional priorities for the Indian River Lagoon Observatory. In FY16, the remaining funds of $37,363 were used to conduct a December 2015 workshop entitled The Indian River Lagoon Observatory: Connecting Users to IRL Data.

Consensus recommendations of the workshop included:

1. Work collaboratively to obtain the funding needed to maintain long-term data collection programs to meet scientific demands.
2. Use scientific data to identify pollution source locations in the IRL watershed and stop the flow of pollution into the Lagoon.
3. Identify and maintain an inventory of historic and ongoing IRL data sets.
4. Increase efforts to archive IRL data sets and make them accessible to users.
5. Organize and maintain a centralized listing of available IRL data sets and information on how to access them.
6. Develop observation and prediction systems as tools that can be used by a variety of user groups.
7. Identify threshold levels for critical environmental IRL data parameters and develop a way to automatically trigger flags when a threshold is exceeded.
8. Process and translate the science data to inform and engage the community.

Operational Support

In FY16, the Harbor Branch Foundation also provided a total of $50,000 in smaller operational grants to support various administrative functions and activities at FAU Harbor Branch.