By SUSAN JONES
If you want to know why the University of Pittsburgh is so concerned about cuts to National Institutes of Health funding, look no further than the latest Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research’s annual list, which ranks Pitt sixth in research funding from the NIH — based on federal fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30.
Since 2006, the Blue Ridge Institute, an independent nonprofit organization, has published rankings of institutions, departments and investigators based on the funding they receive from the NIH. The latest list was released last week.
Topping the list once again is Johns Hopkins University, which received $857.95 million in awards last fiscal year — approximately $15 million more than the previous year — and had 1,512 awards. The rest of the top 10 were:
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University of California, San Francisco, $814.9 million (1,452 awards)
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University of Michigan, $733.9 million (1,387)
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Washington University, St. Louis, $732.4 million (1,192)
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University of Pennsylvania, $691.2 million (1,298)
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University of Pittsburgh, $661.2 million (1,238)
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Massachusetts General Hospital, $655.2 million (1,055)
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Yale University, $645.8 million (1,201)
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Columbia University Health Science, $640.3 million (1,068)
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Stanford University, $613.1 million (1,154)
The report also breaks down how much of that money was for direct costs and indirect costs — which the Trump administration is attempting to cut.
Pitt’s negotiated indirect cost rate with NIH is 59% of allowable direct costs. The report says that Pitt’s total indirect costs were $187.3 million or 28.3% of the total received from NIH. The percentage of NIH money given for indirect costs ranged from 25.8% to 31.3% for the top 10 schools and organizations
Pennsylvania institutions received $2.2 billion from NIH last fiscal year and ranked ninth in per capita spending, at $172.39 per person. Massachusetts topped that list at $512.76 per capita and total awards of $3.46 billion.
For all of the schools, the majority of the NIH funding went to medical schools. The report also broke down which med school departments received the most. For Pitt, those include:
Internal medicine: $160.2 million
Psychiatry: $112.4 million
Pediatrics: $30.7 million
Microbiology/immunology/virology: $27.5 million
Anatomy/cell biology: $22 million
Pharmacology: $21.2 million
Neurosciences: $20.9 million
The Blue Ridge list is compiled by Robert Roskoski Jr. and Tristram Parslow from the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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