This week, Harvard announced a major new initiative to bolster scientific research at the University. The $150 million fund—“one of the largest direct investments in faculty research in Harvard’s history,” according to the announcement—is drawn from the University’s own funds and includes plans for large-scale computing infrastructure. It also calls for research proposals in several fast-growing scientific fields, including neuroscience, infectious disease, and climate.
Designed to directly support research—including curiosity-driven basic research—as well as attract additional investment from industry and corporate sources, the initiative is partly a response to the seismic shifts that have reshaped the research landscape since early 2025, when the Trump administration abruptly terminated more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts to the University. Much of that funding was restored following a U.S. District Court ruling several months later, but the government appealed the decision in an attempt to claw back the money, and the legal fight continues.
In the meantime, the amount of new federal funding awarded to Harvard has dropped. According to senior vice provost for research John Shaw, whose office is overseeing the new initiative, Harvard’s research enterprise costs about $1.5 billion every year. Before the current funding crisis, federal agencies had provided roughly $700 million of that annual total; foundations and corporations provided another $300 million. The University supplied the remaining $500 million. But since 2025, Shaw says, new federal research funding to Harvard has fallen by about 20 percent.
The new initiative steps into this breach, but its main goal, Shaw says, is not to fill the gap in federal funding. Instead, he said, it’s to “make strategic investments in areas that we think are going to be at the forefront of innovation going forward”—fields that the University sees as ripe for breakthroughs that could entice future corporate dollars. The initiative is “an opportunity to be forward-looking,” Shaw says, “and to have our researchers be competitive in a funding landscape that is changing.”
There are two major parts to the initiative. The bulk of the funding, $100 million, will be divided among all 12 Harvard schools, in amounts proportional to their federal research funding expenditures. Each school will use the money for its own central priorities, which can include both basic and applied research projects, as well as programs and technologies that support that research.
Among the largest recipients are Harvard Medical School (HMS), the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In a statement this week to the HMS community, dean George Q. Daley said that the Medical School would use its portion of the funding for AI and research computing infrastructure, foundational research, and platforms and technologies that support research.
The initiative’s remaining $50 million will be used for multiple purposes. First, it will fund new faculty research projects in three areas: neuroscience; immunology, infection, and inflammation; and energy and climate. According to the announcement about the initiative, funding awards for winning proposals will range from $275,000 to $600,000 per year.
Another portion will support a Harvard program called the Frontiers of Innovation for Societal Impact Fund. Launched in 2025, it offers two years of funding for research projects aimed at the public good—from medicine to tech to building design to public policy—that have a strong potential to attract industry or philanthropic support. The fund is intended as a “seeding” mechanism to get those projects underway. In its first year, it awarded a total of $4.9 million to 20 projects.
Through both these awards programs, Shaw says, the University aims to foster collaborative research that draws together faculty members from different disciplines and different parts of the campus. “We’re hoping to spark some new collaborations,” he says, “that hopefully will lead to meaningful new innovations.”
In addition, the initiative will help fund and expand an existing program at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering for “validation projects” that test new technologies that have passed the “discovery” phase and are on a path toward commercialization.
Finally, the initiative will invest in computing infrastructure. Adding to the University’s computational capacity—increasingly critical for scientific research—will provide researchers more access to cloud computing, AI models, and secure data storage.
Shaw, who, as the Dudley professor of structural and economic geology, is a researcher himself, describes the $150 million initiative as a much-needed answer to the uncertainty and upheavals of the past 18 months. “People are realizing now that we can’t be as reliant as we historically have been on specific lines of funding from an agency or a program within a federal agency,” Shaw says. “That’s healthy, because it strengthens our research enterprise. It opens our eyes, and our minds, to considering new ways of engaging in this research.”
