In late September, Harvard announced that it was launching a major new initiative to bolster 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 and AI infrastructure. It also calls for research proposals in several fast-growing scientific fields: neuroscience; immunology, infection, and inflammation; and energy and climate.
The bulk of the funding, $100 million, will be divided among all 12 Harvard schools, in amounts proportional to their federal research funding expenditures. The money will be applied toward each unit’s individual priorities, which can include both basic and applied research, 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 Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The new initiative, designed to directly support research as well as attract additional outside investment, is largely a response to the seismic shifts that have rocked 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 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 H. 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. Since the Trump administration took office, Shaw says, new federal research funding to Harvard has fallen by about 20 percent.
Federal grants have slowed at universities nationwide, but Harvard became a particular target for the Trump administration, which continues using multiple levers to try to deny the University funding. The Washington Post and Politico reported that National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya had refused a Trump request, during a September 2026 Oval Office meeting, to further cut Harvard’s funding. At that same meeting, the administration floated a proposal (rescinded after bipartisan pushback) to give political appointees veto power over NIH grants. Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation released a memo this September, announcing a shift away from its traditionally broad portfolio of research and training grants in favor of research aligned with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Amid all this upheaval, scientists across the University have been racing to adapt. At first, many curtailed their research or paused certain projects. More recently, individual researchers—and the University as a whole—have been working to diversify their funding sources, by expanding partnerships with industry and corporations and seeking increased support from philanthropic organizations. Many are also redoubling their efforts to obtain grants and contracts from government agencies.
Materials scientist Jennifer Lewis is one of the researchers making rapid adjustments. The Wyss professor for biologically inspired engineering, Lewis is working to develop an artificial kidney and other human organs. During the first three weeks of May 2025, she says, she received cancellation notices for $7 million worth of research grants. “I call it the dark period,” she says. “We definitely scaled back some of our bigger, more ambitious projects.” She stopped hiring for open research positions in her lab, contributing to a loss of momentum that persists. Her cancelled grants were all eventually reinstated, but she says it took more than a year for some of the funding to come back online. Not until the summer of 2026 did her lab begin cautiously rebuilding.
“At least in the biological space, people are definitely looking more toward philanthropic foundations and industry,” says Lewis, who has a longstanding partnership with the pharmaceutical giant Roche. Some researchers, she added, are simply writing more proposals, to both public and private funding sources. “People are trying to take more shots on goal,” she says, “to just hopefully maintain their funding levels.”
HMS Dean George Q. Daley has seen a similar response in the medical research community. “Everyone is moving in a similar direction,” he says. “There’s a sense that if the federal government isn’t the bedrock, then we’re going to need to scramble.” The number of funding applications HMS researchers sent to foundations this year has more than doubled, he says. At the same time, HMS is also increasingly focused on industry collaborations like the one Harvard has had for more than a decade with Roche and its biotech subsidiary Genentech. In September, the companies opened a 95,000 square-foot “innovation center” at Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus in Allston.
The appeal to industry is also part of the backdrop of the $150 million initiative Harvard launched this fall. The fund’s main goal is not simply to fill the gap in federal funding or try to sustain Harvard’s research enterprise as it existed two years ago, Shaw says. Instead, it’s to invest strategically in areas such as neuroscience, immunology, and climate sustainability that are ripe for big breakthroughs. That could entice corporate dollars down the road. “It’s really an opportunity to be forward-looking,” Shaw says, “and to have our researchers be competitive in a funding landscape that is changing.”
One component of the initiative will support a Harvard program called the Frontiers of Innovation for Societal Impact Fund. Launched in 2025, it offers funding for research projects aimed at the public good—from medicine to tech to public policy—that have a strong potential to attract industry or philanthropic support. Another component will help fund 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.
“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.” Without that pivot, he worries, uncertainty over federal funding could cause scientists to hunker down and become risk-averse. “If you become too conservative and try to circle the wagons just to protect what you have,” he says, “you’re going to become stale in research pretty quickly.”
A similar turn toward industry is playing out in many places across campus. At HMS’s Therapeutics Initiative, the past 18 months of federal funding chaos prompted what executive director of therapeutics translation Mark Namchuk calls an “extreme acceleration” of the work he’d been doing to establish partnerships with biopharmaceutical companies. “I think so far we’re just scratching the surface of what we could do in collaboration with these companies,” he says.
At the University-wide Office of Technology Development (OTD), which helps researchers with promising discoveries make the jump from the laboratory to the marketplace, chief technology development officer Sam T. Liss has seen an uptick in the number of faculty members expressing a “very, very high level of interest in tapping into industry funding.” That includes many, he says, who had not previously thought of their work in terms of marketable products.
The OTD helps researchers navigate patents and copyrights, coordinate industry and corporate partnerships, and form their own startup companies. It also manages three accelerator funds—in biomedicine, physics and engineering, and climate and sustainability—that help push forward early-stage technologies until they’re ready to be licensed and commercialized.
Of course, industry partnerships come with their own challenges. “Universities and companies have fundamentally different missions in life,” Liss says. One exists to create knowledge and disseminate it widely; the other tries to make money from proprietary information that’s often kept secret. The trick, says Liss, is finding a balance that helps companies profit while protecting faculty members’ freedom of inquiry and ability to publish their work, and simultaneously allowing the University to fulfill its academic and educational mission. (Harvard has guidelines in place to ensure these protections are upheld.)
But there are also important and sometimes overlooked benefits to collaborating with industry. Yes, companies can offer much-needed funding and a path to bringing faculty discoveries to the public, but they also often bring data, equipment, computing capacity, or scientific expertise that academic researchers don’t have access to, says Steven C. Currall, the executive director and associate vice provost for academic-corporate initiatives.
Currall joined Harvard in July 2025—at the height of the turmoil over federal funding cuts—stepping into a newly created role in which he has focused on cultivating long-term “strategic alliances” with companies like Google, Amazon, and Roche. Increasingly, he says, industry partners are looking for arrangements with the University that go beyond a one-off collaboration on a specific research project. “Some companies have rediscovered university relationships as a source of innovation,” he says.
And yet, everyone interviewed for this story agreed that funding from industry—or philanthropists, or foundations, or even the University’s own investment initiative—cannot fully make up for lost federal research dollars, either in scope or scale, or in the ability and willingness to support long-term, curiosity-driven research whose practical applications are not always apparent up front. Federal grants are not the only way to fund such foundational science—philanthropic organizations and even some companies do also provide support, but rarely with the same consistency. “Sponsored research is valuable on its own,” says Daley, the HMS dean, “but it’s not the wellspring of support that researchers routinely get from the federal government.”
