Carnegie Institution Of Washington

Carnegie Institution Of Washington, doing business as Carnegie Institution For Science, is a nonprofit research organization headquartered in Washington, DC that conducts and funds basic scientific research across astronomy, Earth and planetary sciences, biology, materials science, and ecology, operating almost exclusively as a federal grant recipient (97% of recent awards are prime grants, with 3% as sub-recipient activity). The institution competes in full-and-open federal grant competitions across the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health and does not hold SBA set-aside designations.

Carnegie's federal grant footprint concentrates in NSF and NASA funding. The top five customer agencies by award count account for 58% of recent awards, led by the National Science Foundation with 163 awards, NASA's Shared Services Center with 111 awards ($16.2 million combined potential value), and NASA headquarters with 63 awards. Within NSF, the Division of Earth Sciences is a principal source (27 awards). By dollar volume, NASA Shared Services Center dominates with $16.2 million in combined potential value across 111 awards, followed by NASA Headquarters with $7.5 million across 26 awards. Recent representative work includes a $780 thousand Department of Energy Office of Science grant (CFDA 81.049) for multifunctional carbon-based clathrate materials research (March 2026–March 2027); a $192.6 thousand NASA Science Mission Directorate cooperative agreement for balanced science program execution aligned with exploration initiative objectives spanning lunar, lunar orbit, and Mars research (January 2026–January 2031); a $420.5 thousand NSF Division of Ocean Sciences grant for submarine volcano magmatic architecture research along the Kermadec-Tonga Arc using satellite altimetry (October 2025–September 2028); and a $155 thousand NSF Division of Earth Sciences grant for ONEMINERALOGY, an open-science ecosystem for mineralogical data curation and infrastructure development (December 2025–November 2028).

Award activity has grown modestly, from 13 awards in 2022 to 22 in 2025, with four awards recorded in 2026 year-to-date. Twenty-seven awards totaling $3.9 million in combined potential value reach ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months, representing recompete exposure across NSF Earth Sciences, NASA Earth Science Applications, and NIH biomedical programs. The top parent contract vehicles noted in the source (Indefinite Delivery Contracts N0001475C0265, N0001484C0173, N0001481C0065) carry minimal task-order volume (one to three task orders each) and appear to represent residual contract activity rather than current core business.

Carnegie's sub-recipient footprint shows the institution serves supporting roles on university-led collaborative research. Named prime grantees Carnegie works under include Michigan State University (on the NSF Biology Integration Institute "Life Without Water" project addressing desiccation tolerance), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (planet-search pipeline design for exoplanet detection research), Pennsylvania State University (volcano-tectonic earthquake analysis at Mauna Loa), California Institute of Technology (Roman Galaxy Redshift Survey infrastructure), Johns Hopkins University (AnVIL computational platform outreach and training), and Purdue University (exoplanet cloud microphysics and tree hydraulics research). These sub-awards typically involve specialized laboratory analysis, computational modeling, or data science contributions rather than prime program management.

The institution's award profile reflects a specialized research foundation: basic research in geochemistry, astrobiology, molecular biology, and planetary physics, with heavy emphasis on laboratory and field experimental work, instrumentation development, and collaborative multi-institutional science. Service Contract Inventory reporting captures only one SCI record (a sub-recipient engagement in FY2024) and provides no workforce scale or pricing posture data; SCI does not capture the institutional research grant activity that constitutes Carnegie's core federal footprint. Carnegie operates research laboratories at its Washington, DC headquarters and maintains astronomical observatories in Chile (Las Campanas Observatory) and other field sites; place of performance spans the DC facility, observatory locations, and collaborative university partner sites.