Illinois Institute Of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology's Sponsored Research and Programs Division, doing business as I I T, is a tax-exempt private research university based in Chicago providing federal tuition funding for military personnel and advanced scientific research to civilian and defense agencies as a prime recipient and grantee. As a non-profit educational institution, IIT competes full-and-open across federal grant and contract vehicles with no SBA set-aside posture; recent awards carry no set-aside designations.

The institution's federal footprint spans 1,059 awards (95% prime, 5% sub-award) across 118 customer agencies with combined potential value of $32.8 million and $637.9 million in obligated dollars. Award volume has declined from 60 in 2024 to 35 in 2025, with 36 awards (combined potential value $842 thousand) reaching completion within the next twenty-four months. The top five agencies by award count—the National Science Foundation (241), the Department of the Air Force (93), the General Services Administration Public Buildings Service (49), the Department of the Navy (44), and the Department of the Army (31)—account for 43% of recent awards. By dollar value, the Navy Naval Education and Training Command leads with 19 awards worth $5.3 million combined, followed by NASA's Shared Services Center (19 awards, $3.1 million) and the Food and Drug Administration (16 awards, $1.5 million).

IIT's concrete capability portfolio divides into two primary lines. The first, tuition and educational services, dominates contract awards: the institution receives Navy delivery orders (typically $8,000 to $543,000 per order) through a Basic Ordering Agreement running to October 2034 for undergraduate and graduate tuition and fees supporting Navy personnel, NROTC midshipmen, and training programs. A June 2026 Navy order valued $509 thousand, and a May 2025 delivery order valued $543,957 for NROTC retroactive liability tuition exemplify this recurring work stream. The second, federal research and development, anchors the grant portfolio. IIT holds significant IDIQ research positions including a $146.3 million single-award vehicle with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for preclinical infectious disease models and a $149.995 million multiple-award contract with the National Cancer Institute for the PREVENT Cancer Preclinical Drug Development Program. Recent research grants span machine learning and AI—a $200,000 NSF award for autonomous urban mobility systems networking (April 2027), a $4 million NSF IOWARP platform for data management in AI-infused scientific workflows (August 2024)—advanced materials and energy—an NSF-funded $618,137 CAREER award for laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing with non-spherical powder (August 2024), a $1.5 million PIRE award for all-solid-state batteries for clean energy (January 2023)—biomedical sciences including a $648,992 National Cancer Institute award for antibody chelator conjugates in breast cancer therapy (June 2026), and environmental and infrastructure resilience. IIT also operates federally funded centers: a $4 million NSF research framework award (IOWARP) with sub-recipient The HDF Group for unified data format and API development, and cooperative agreements for food safety laboratory capacity (FDA, ongoing) and microgrid cybersecurity (Department of Energy, through January 2027).

IIT's corporate structure includes the Illinois Institute of Technology proper (the prime contracting entity) and the IIT Research Institute (IITRI), a subsidiary engaged in preclinical drug development, toxicology, and applied research. The source identifies IIT's portfolio as including "hundreds of millions of dollars" in NIH work through IITRI on preclinical drug development, positioning the institution as a significant federal research performer in life sciences and advanced materials. Subcontract work flows through collaborations with peer research universities—the University of Michigan on geospace dynamics (January 2024), Northwestern University on nutrition precision health, Johns Hopkins on cardiac physiology—rather than through subcontracts to commercial vendors, reflecting IIT's role as a research institution embedded in academia.

Across both contracts and grants, IIT competes unencumbered by set-aside constraints and operates in a full-and-open federal market. The recompete cliff of $842 thousand over twenty-four months is modest relative to the institution's portfolio scale, suggesting stable recurring funding streams in Navy tuition lines and multi-year NSF research awards with strong renewal prospects. The significant gap between obligated dollars ($637.9 million) and potential value ($32.8 million) reflects backlog of multi-year research awards already funded but extending into future fiscal years, a characteristic of large academic research institutions.