South Florida Veterans Affairs Foundation For Research And Education, Inc.

South Florida Veterans Affairs Foundation For Research And Education, Inc. is a tax-exempt nonprofit foundation based in Miami, Florida that serves as a prime federal grant recipient and subrecipient in biomedical and clinical research, focusing on veteran and military health conditions aligned with Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense research priorities. The organization operates exclusively in the federal grant space — no prime contracts, no IDVs, no BPAs — and holds 74% of its recent awards as prime recipient, with 26% as subaward work flowing from larger research institutions.

The foundation's customer footprint concentrates heavily on VA and DoD medical research. The Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Health Administration Veterans Integrated Service Network 8 accounts for six awards ($138 thousand combined potential value), the Defense Health Agency for five awards, and the Department of the Army Medical Command for three awards, collectively representing 67% of recent award volume. The National Institutes of Health (including its National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health) rounds out the active set with four awards across two distinct NIH entities. The top-customer rankings by count and by dollar value are functionally identical, indicating balanced contract size distribution across the core customer set.

Recent representative work reflects a research portfolio centered on Gulf War Illness biomarkers and veteran health outcomes. South Florida VA Foundation received a $769,999 Defense Health Agency Project Grant (CFDA 12.420, Military Medical Research and Development program) awarded August 1, 2026, to identify sphingolipids and eicosanoids from plasma and tear fluid as disease-relevant biomarkers in Gulf War Illness, with performance through July 31, 2029 in Miami. As a subrecipient, the foundation participates in multi-site clinical research led by the University of Pittsburgh on manual therapy and exercise optimization for lumbar spinal stenosis, in George Washington University's Glycemia Reduction Approaches in Diabetes (GRADE) comparative effectiveness study, and in the Henry M. Jackson Foundation's Department of Defense and VA collaborative research on uterine fibroids and pain outcomes in veteran women.

Activity has been episodic, with three awards in 2021, one in 2022, two in 2023, one in 2024, and two in 2026. The combined potential value across all 27 awards stands at $208 thousand; however, combined dollars obligated across all awards total $7.9 million, indicating that earlier awards in the source data (the foundation's first federal award dates to November 2008) carried larger dollar magnitudes than recent potential-value figures suggest. The foundation's research scope aligns with applied life-sciences research and medical research development, with category concentration in research and development in physical, engineering, and life sciences (three awards) and in biotechnology (one award).