Board Of Trustees Of Illinois State University

The Board of Trustees of Illinois State University, operating through its Research and Sponsored Programs Division (doing business as Comptroller's Office), is a public higher-education research institution based in Normal, Illinois, that acts as a prime recipient on federal research grants and the holder of one sole-source federal contract, competing exclusively in full-and-open (non-set-aside) federal funding streams.

Illinois State University operates as a state-controlled institution of higher learning and federal research grant recipient across a portfolio dominated by National Science Foundation awards. The university's federal funding footprint is almost entirely grants-based: of 316 total awards in the source data, 284 are prime grants (90%) and 32 are grant sub-awards (10%), with a single contract prime award. The university holds no federal contract vehicles and competes no federal contract work. Its one contract award is a $99,994 firm fixed price purchase order to the Naval Air Warfare Center for test and evaluation services on 3D-Printed Cone Spray Ionization technology, dated February 5, 2025, and scheduled to complete July 5, 2025. That contract was awarded sole-source due to the university's patented technology and is not set-aside.

The university's grant portfolio centers on fundamental and applied research across physical sciences, biological sciences, geosciences, education, and engineering. Representative prime grant work includes: a $555,000 National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Project Grant (awarded June 17, 2026) on the response and defense mechanisms of extraintestinal Escherichia coli to reactive oxygen and chlorine species, running through May 31, 2029; a $234,795 National Science Foundation Division of Physics Research at Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) grant on machine learning models for atomic and molecular collisions, awarded September 1, 2025 and running through August 31, 2028; a $611,586 NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering grant for advanced cyberinfrastructure to support campus research networks at 100G capacity, awarded May 1, 2024; a $391,078 NSF Division of Chemistry RUI award on dark molecular transitions and charge dynamics using metasurfaces, awarded September 1, 2025; a $510,759 NSF Division of Chemistry collaborative research grant on nitrogen-enabling cycloaddition reactions, awarded August 1, 2024; and a $322,000 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Endangered Species Recovery Implementation grant on bumble bee population decline and differential susceptibility to stressors, awarded May 20, 2025 and running through May 19, 2028. The university also acts as sub-recipient on grants from prime grantees including the University of Illinois, Southern Illinois University, Columbia University, the University of Georgia, the University of Minnesota, and Regents of the University of Idaho, contributing subject matter expertise, hosting regional hubs, and providing data analysis and field research support.

Customer concentration is dispersed across federal research agencies rather than concentrated in a single customer. The National Science Foundation dominates by award count with 77 awards, followed by the National Institutes of Health (16 awards), the National Endowment for the Arts (12 awards), and the U.S. Geological Survey Office of Acquisitions and Grants (10 awards). Across the portfolio, 72 distinct federal customer agencies have placed grants with the university, with NSF-sponsored research constituting the largest share of the award volume.

Activity shows recent growth: the university received 32 awards in 2024, up from 17 in 2022, though 2025 and 2026 volumes are lower, likely reflecting source data recency. Fourteen awards face ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months, representing recompete or close-out opportunities in the near term. The combined potential value of all 316 awards in the source data is $658 thousand, but this ceiling figure is atypical for research grants and does not reflect actual awarded or obligated dollar value — the source reports $287.5 million in combined obligated dollars across all awards, indicating that actual award values are substantially higher than ceiling figures reported in the federal grants system.

The university's sub-award footprint reflects collaborative research partnerships rather than vendor-prime relationships. As a sub-recipient, Illinois State University participates in multi-institutional consortia on grants focused on agricultural sustainability, data science workforce development, antimicrobial research, carbon sequestration, and health professions education. The university does not function as a subcontractor to for-profit defense or IT contractors in the traditional sense; its sub-award work is research collaboration within peer institutions and federal agencies.