Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, doing business as CSH, is a non-profit research and education institution headquartered in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, that acts as a prime recipient of federal grants and, occasionally, a subrecipient on contract and grant work. CSH operates primarily as a research institution and conference/training venue, competing in full-and-open federal grant programs rather than under small-business set-asides.

CSH's federal footprint centers on fundamental biological research, advanced training, and scientific conferences. The institution delivers concrete capabilities in cancer biology, neuroscience, genomics, computational biology, plant development, and infectious disease research through investigator-led research grants and substantial training and conference operations. Representative research work includes a $2.77 million five-year project grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to study social odor modulation of auditory cortex via the basal amygdala in mice; a $1.75 million Trans-NIH award on speckle-based gene regulation; a $1.41 million NINDS grant on calcium homeostasis modulator protein structures using cryo-EM; and a $1.40 million Defense Health Agency project grant on targeting tumor-specific AURKA isoforms in pancreatic cancer. CSH also hosts biennial and annual scientific conferences (Mechanisms of Aging, Systems Immunology, Glia in Health & Disease, Protein Homeostasis, Telomeres & Telomerase, and dozens of others) that receive individual project grant support of $200 thousand to $400 thousand per conference cycle. The institution operates intensive postgraduate training courses in areas including single-cell analysis, synthetic biology, Drosophila neurobiology, structural biology, and plant genetics; these courses are funded through NSF and NIH grant awards.

Customer concentration is distributed across the National Institutes of Health (196 awards across multiple institutes), the National Science Foundation (93 awards), and the Defense Health Agency (multiple project grants), with the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Mental Health, and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke driving substantial award volume. By potential value, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development anchor the portfolio. Of the 803 total awards tracked, 765 are prime awards (95%), with 38 subrecipient awards (5%) under primes including Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Stanford, UC Davis, and Baylor College of Medicine.

Recompete exposure in the next twenty-four months totals 54 awards with a combined potential value of $12 thousand—a modest cliff reflecting the biennial and multi-year grant structures typical of NSF and NIH funding. Activity has remained steady at 21–42 prime awards per year over the past five years, with no sharp growth or decline. CSH's research focus and non-profit status position it outside traditional federal contractor competition; the institution pursues federal research funding through peer-reviewed grant mechanisms rather than sealed-bid procurement vehicles.