Record Breaking Research
Illinois has shattered its previous high mark in sponsored research.
In FY24, sponsored research expenditures grew by nearly 10% — from $691 million the previous year to $755 million in FY24. That is an enormous achievement, and one that is a collective effort in every corner of the institution.
We’ve long been one of the nation’s leaders in NSF funding. Now, we are seeing significant growth in our Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy and Department of Defense expenditures, building on strategic investments to diversify our portfolio.
Research is a long game. Our previous two strategic plans set a foundation for this growth, and our next strategic framework — Boldly Illinois — aims to build on this success and promote the big ideas for which Illinois is known.
Our $755 million research and scholarship enterprise continues to push the edges of human knowledge across the entire disciplinary spectrum.
ARPA-H Successes
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is a relatively new federal funding program housed in the DHHS to support transformative biomedical and health breakthroughs.
In the past year, Illinois had great success accessing the research funding available through this program:
Margin Diagnostics
MarginDxcombines multimodal label-free optical screening technologies with AI screening tools to ensure that tumor tissue and cells are completely removed during surgery. The project is funded up to $33 million by ARPA-H and led by Illinois electrical and computer engineering professor Stephen Boppart with clinical partners Mayo Clinic and Carle Health.
MASCOT
The Manufacturing Agile and SCalable Organoid Tumor models project isfocused on developing a radically new platform to manufacture tumor models and dramatically expand their availability for both medical research and personalized medicine. The project is funded up to $21 million by ARPA-H and led by Illinois mechanical science and engineering professor Bill King.
NSF Global Centers
Of the six 2024 Global Centers announced by the NSF, two are based at Illinois. These awards focus on advancing bioeconomy research to solve global challenges, whether by increasing crop resilience, converting plant matter or other biomass into fuel or paving the way for biofoundries to scale up applications of biotechnology for societal benefit.
Achieving even one NSF Global Center award is an enormous accomplishment. To receive two awards is unprecedented and demonstrates that Illinois is and will continue to be a global leader in pursuing bold ideas with world-changing impact.
The two NSF Global Centers based at Illinois are:
Alliance for Socially-acceptable & Actionable Plants
ASAP delivers synthetic biology solutions to produce high-energy, water-use-efficient crops. To do so, it exploits natural biodiversity in gene sequences to engineer crops with increased lipid content and greater water-use efficiency. The global center draws on the expertise of a multidisciplinary team of scientists from four countries to integrate recent breakthroughs in genetics, protein modelling, synthetic biology, AI and biotechnology.
Reliable and Scalable Biofoundries for Biomanufacturing and Global Bioeconomy
This global center based at Illinois will bring together 40 investigators from five countries to develop cross-national standards for biofoundry applications, best practices for governance and regulation, and programs for industry partnerships, public outreach, education and workforce development. This project builds on the iBioFoundry project at Illinois, which is one of only five new biofoundries in the U.S.