Franklin And Marshall College

Franklin And Marshall College, a private nonprofit educational institution based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, operates as a prime recipient of federal research grants—predominantly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health—rather than as a federal contractor. The college competes in unrestricted research grant solicitations and does not hold SBA certifications or compete under set-asides.

The college's federal footprint is concentrated in basic and applied research across the biological and physical sciences, supported by 85 prime awards (89% of total) spanning the past several years. Recent representative work includes a $245,171 NSF Biological Sciences grant (CFDA 47.074) to investigate hydrodynamic benefits and sensory coordination in collective squid swimming, awarded January 2027 with performance through December 2029; a $155,616 NSF Biological Sciences grant on developmental cold exposure and organism resilience in wild bird populations, awarded October 2025 and completing September 2028; a $322,130 NSF Biological Sciences grant on seed filling in Arabidopsis embryos, awarded January 2025 and completing December 2027; and a $390,720 NSF Integrative Activities grant (CFDA 47.083) for acquisition of a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer supporting research in physical organic chemistry, structural biology, and materials science, awarded September 2023 and completing August 2026. Research infrastructure work includes a CC* Storage award from NSF's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (November 2024, completing October 2026) supporting a 2.14 petabyte research data storage solution enabling campus researchers to connect to global research data infrastructure and participate in the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing / Open Science Data Federation.

Customer concentration sits heavily with the National Science Foundation across 37 awards, with thematic strength in physics, integrative organismal systems, mathematics, chemistry, materials research, and ocean sciences. The National Institutes of Health (6 awards) and Department of the Navy (4 awards) round out the top customer set. The college also acts as sub-recipient on eleven grants, including participation in the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center managed by Oregon State University and West Virginia University, a subaward site for Penn State University's "Better Together" Hispanic health initiative, and a subrecipient role for World Learning Inc.'s Supporting Higher Education in Refugee Resettlement project sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Faculty collaborators from the college contribute to multidisciplinary consortia work, including computational neuron modeling in collaboration with Boston University School of Medicine and Barcelona's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

Award activity has fluctuated year over year—five awards in 2023, nine in 2024, five in 2025, three in 2026, and one in 2027 to date—with four awards completing within the next twenty-four months. The college's research mission emphasizes undergraduate participation, hands-on training, and public outreach; representative projects include workforce development in STEM fields, community college partnerships for advanced instrumentation access, science communication through public radio and aquarium collaborations, and K–12 education engagement through high school partnerships and teacher development.