N.C. State asked for six fewer earmarks this year.

As noted previously, the university is the top school in North Carolina in earmark requests from members of the House delegation.

A school official said that it has cut back, however. Last year, the school requested 32 earmarks and received 10. This year, it has asked for 26. 

They represent only a sliver of its overall research budget, said Terri Lomax, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies.

During fiscal year 2008, the university received $8 million of federal earmarks for research out of a total of $313 million in total research spending. 

Terri Lomax says researchers sometimes tailor their requests.

N.C. State University's vice chancellor said that a lot of the earmarks the college requests are for orphaned research that does not fit into existing programs through the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Often, it's because it's not basic research but not yet commercially viable.

But it can also be because there is no federal program that covers the topic, she said, citing a National Textiles Center on campus that looks at new methods and markets for textiles.

"There's not a federal agency with a clear mandate for providing research on textiles," she said.

She said that researchers often look for ways to fit their research into existing programs, such as military research or even the NASA budget. That's how an earmark came about that would study the effects of the Martian atmosphere on plants.

"It has lots of other uses for agriculture, such as understanding how plants to respond to stress conditions in the environment such as drought or global warming," she said.

The head of N.C. State University research says they asked for less than in years past.

Terri Lomax, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies at the Raleigh college, said that she decided to be more choosy about the special appropriations it requested from the state's Congressional delegation.

"I insisted that we be more selective," she said. 

She asked deans at the college to rank their requests, then she and several staffers went through them before presenting them to the chancellor's office and the University of North Carolina's general administration.

The projects were then presented to different members of the delegation, based on their interests. (Reps. Bob Etheridge and Mike McIntyre, for example, were asked to help fund sweet potato research because they have farmers in their districts.)

In all, she said the university asked for 23 earmarks, the same number that members of the House requested for it. From there, they'll then get peer-reviewed at the appropriate agencies and checked by Congressional committees.

"They actually get more thoroughly reviewed than traditional research grants," she said. 

Previously: N.C. State top earmark college in North Carolina.