The Research Foundation For The State University Of New York

The Research Foundation For The State University Of New York, operating as Sponsored Projects Services, is a nonprofit research administration organization serving as fiscal agent and sponsored programs administrator for the State University of New York system. RF SUNY operates as a child entity within the parent organization bearing the same name and serves as the contracting and grant-receiving entity for federal research and educational initiatives across 71 SUNY institutions. The vendor competes across full-and-open federal procurement with no set-aside designations; it does not hold SBA certifications.

RF SUNY's federal footprint spans research administration, research execution, and educational training delivery across biomedical sciences, engineering, geosciences, computer science, and social sciences. The vendor acts as prime recipient on federal research grants—not as a contractor offering goods or commercial services. RF SUNY administers project grants, cooperative agreements, and Other Transaction agreements where underlying research is performed by SUNY faculty and researchers at host institutions. Recent representative work includes: a $2.2 million NIGMS grant for transcription factor binding to chromatin research (through August 2029); a $2.144 million NIMHD grant for comparative effectiveness research on food prescription programs for food-insecure families (through March 2030); a $2.401 million NIDDK grant for polymicrobial interactions in catheter-associated urinary tract infections (through June 2030); and a $3.992 million Department of Education FIPSE grant for civil discourse and civic renewal programming (through December 2029). Prime federal contract work is limited: recent examples include a $209,482 Naval Sea Systems Command definitive cost-no-fee research contract (completed January 2027) and a $53,352 Department of Veterans Affairs delivery order for human messenger RNA sequencing and bioinformatic analysis services (completed September 2026). RF SUNY holds a DARPA Other Transaction IDV for the TIAMAT (Transfer from Imprecise and Abstract Models to Autonomous Technologies) Program valued at $3.816 million, awarded July 2024.

Customer concentration is high and driven by federal research agencies. The top five agencies by award count—National Science Foundation (718 awards), NIH broadly (328 awards), NIH/NIAID (104 awards), NIH/NIDCR (90 awards), and NASA Shared Services Center (76 awards)—represent 41 percent of recent awards. By potential value, NIH/NICHD leads (38 awards, $109.2 million combined potential value), followed by NIAID ($38.1 million), NIH/NHLBI ($32.8 million), and NASA ($10.4 million). The vendor's prime footprint skews heavily toward research grants: 91 percent of awards are primes (2,943 awards); only 9 percent are subcontracts (305 awards). Within SCI-reportable service contracts, RF SUNY operates as prime on modest-scale federal administrative and research-support services, invoicing $13.8 million across FY2022–FY2025 (roughly $3.1–$4.3 million per year) with 9–18 FTEs per year delivering services on prime contracts. Government-paid hourly rates on SCI-reportable work range from $81/hr at the 10th percentile to $128/hr at the 90th percentile, with a median of $100/hr. Across SCI-reportable prime contracts, subcontractors account for an average of 14 percent of contractor hours; RF SUNY names nine distinct subcontractors on these records.

RF SUNY operates as a fiscal agent and research administrator rather than as a service contractor. Its role is to receive and administer federal research funding on behalf of SUNY institutions—to execute grants, cooperate agreements, and OTA task orders where faculty and students at University at Buffalo, University of Rochester, Syracuse University, SUNY Stony Brook, and other SUNY campuses perform the actual research. Recent grant awards span NSF (Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Engineering, Geosciences, Materials Research, Education programs); NIH institutes and centers (NICHD, NIAID, NIDCR, NHLBI, NIMH, NIDA, NEI, NINDS, NCI, NIBIB, NIGMS, NIDDK); and other federal agencies including the Department of Education, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Endowment for the Humanities, and NASA. Activity has grown from 175 awards in 2023 to 252 in 2024, then declined to 179 in 2025 and 115 in 2026; 256 awards face completion within the next 24 months (combined potential value $8.8 million). The vendor's total combined potential value across all 3,248 awards in the source dataset is $252.4 million; total obligated dollars ($3.06 billion) substantially exceed potential value, reflecting multi-year grant funding and prior-year obligations.

RF SUNY's teaming and subcontract posture reflects its role as research administrator. When RF SUNY subcontracts on grants, it does so under prime grants held by other universities or consortia—for example, as a collaborator on a University of Pittsburgh NIDDK grant (2025), on University of Rochester NIMH and NSF work (2026), on University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins collaborative NIH awards, and on multiple NSF collaborative research projects with peer institutions including University of Kentucky, University of Chicago, University of North Carolina, Cornell University, and others. The vendor also receives sub-awards from research consortia and collaborative centers, including health research organizations and academic medical centers. This subcontracting pattern is consistent with RF SUNY's function as a distributed fiscal agent across SUNY's multi-campus system rather than as a commercial prime contractor seeking teaming arrangements with other vendors.

The vendor's grant and cooperative-agreement posture spans basic research (NSF fundamental science programs), applied research (NIH biomedical research), clinical research (NIH clinical trials and health outcomes studies), and education and workforce development (NSF STEM education, NIH training programs, Department of Education higher-education initiatives). Recent workforce and education grants include NSF CAREER awards in engineering and computer science, NIH research training programs in anesthesiology and cellular sciences, NSF REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) programs in biometrics and AI education, and Department of Education TRIO Student Support Services. RF SUNY does not hold commercial-service vehicle positions such as GWACs, GSA Schedule, or civilian agency BPAs; its parent vehicle holdings are limited to federal research IDIQs and Other Transaction agreements where underlying work is research execution or research administration.

A 24-month recompete cliff of $8.8 million reflects near-term expiration of existing research grants, representing renewal opportunity for SUNY researchers and administration continuity risk for the vendor's fiscal-administration footprint. The vendor's federal baseline is stable and diversified across 184 federal customer organizations; customer concentration at NIH and NSF signals strong exposure to fundamental research and research-training funding cycles subject to appropriations uncertainty and investigator-competition dynamics rather than commercial contracting cycles.