We do research with universities on two fronts. First, as Dr. Gaden indicated, the commission has a responsibility to coordinate, conduct, and communicate research. As a component of that, we have two research programs. One is called our fishery research program, and the other is our sea lamprey research program. What happens through those is that we put out small calls for research projects through universities. The pre-proposals come in and go through peer review, and we award research contracts, primarily to universities, to do research on both fisheries and on sea lamprey.
We also have another very unique and very effective program with the universities. That is with Michigan State University in Michigan. Marc and I are both adjunct at Michigan State as well as at the University of Michigan. We have an agreement with Michigan State University and with the University of Guelph. Basically, what we've done is hire research scientists at those universities. They exist in the academic environment. The commission pays their salaries and benefits and some of their operating costs, and they do research on various aspects of sea lamprey control.
What happens is that, because they're in the university setting, they are very effective at bringing in additional research dollars from a variety of organizations. We have one star at Michigan State University who probably, over the last five or six years, in addition to the money we've provided to him, has probably brought in about $1 million a year in additional research contracts.