The Rockefeller University

Rockefeller University, a private research institution headquartered in New York, functions primarily as a federal grant recipient in basic biomedical, neuroscience, and infectious-disease research rather than a federal contractor; the institution operates as a prime recipient on the vast majority of its 845 federal awards (90%), with most funding flowing from the National Institutes of Health and its component institutes.

Rockefeller is a tax-exempt nonprofit educational institution with no federal contract prime positions and minimal Service Contract Inventory activity. The university competes in full-and-open federal grant competitions, not under set-asides. Its federal footprint is dominated by NIH research awards—principally Project Grants supporting investigator-initiated research—across a broad portfolio spanning molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience, immunology, infectious disease, cancer biology, and structural biology. Representative recent work includes $862,748 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for elucidating host and viral determinants of hepatitis B virus transcription (awarded February 2026), $1.65 million from the Defense Health Agency for therapeutic targeting of breast cancer metastasis-driver genes (August 2026), $2.373 million from NIAID for understanding HIV-1 latency and reservoir persistence in primary cells (June 2026), and $798,670 from NIAID for bioinformatics-guided synthesis of novel antibiotics from previously inaccessible microbial dark matter (June 2026). The institution also holds a $3.61 million NIH Office of the Director Construction Support grant (September 2025) for expanding the Precision Instrumentation Technologies Resource Center.

Customer concentration is tightly clustered within the NIH ecosystem. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases accounts for 117 of the top-tracked awards; the National Cancer Institute, 66; the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, 58; and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, 49 awards carrying $18.6 million in combined potential value—the highest single-institute allocation. Collectively, the top five NIH funding entities account for approximately 60% of recent award count. This concentration reflects Rockefeller's research mission and the dominance of basic-science funding within the NIH portfolio rather than diversification across federal agencies or acquisition command structures.

Award volume has grown year over year—31 awards in 2022 to 55 in 2024—though recent activity (2026 year-to-date shows 20 awards) may reflect reporting lag rather than true trajectory. Combined potential value across all 845 awards stands at $46 million, but combined obligated dollars reach $2.06 billion, indicating that many of these awards are mature, multi-year efforts where obligation has far exceeded the original ceiling estimates. Sixty-six awards face ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months (combined potential value $975 thousand), positioning the institution for a significant recompete cycle in FY2027–2028.

Rockefeller participates in the federal grant ecosystem primarily as a research performer and sub-recipient, not as a systems integrator or contractor. The institution holds grant sub-awards from major research universities (Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, UC institutions, University of Washington, Vanderbilt, Mayo Clinic) and collaborates actively with academic consortia on NIH cooperative agreements and program-project grants. Named recent sub-award collaborations include work on developing immunogens for broadly neutralizing anti-HIV-1 antibodies (California Institute of Technology prime, March 2026), functional genomic mapping of gene vulnerabilities in Mycobacterium abscessus across host-relevant environments (sub-recipient role, June 2026), and investigations of mucosal breaks in rheumatoid arthritis initiation (Stanford prime, October 2024). The university also serves as a sub-recipient under the Einstein-Rockefeller-CUNY Center for AIDS Research (Albert Einstein College of Medicine prime, awarded July 2024) and contributes to multi-institutional Centers for Genetic Regulatory Genomics, hepatobiliary cancer SPOREs, and food-allergy research consortia.

Service Contract Inventory captures minimal activity—only two SCI records spanning FY2022–2024, reflecting roughly 0.4 to 1.0 federal FTEs on service contracts above the $150,000 threshold in those years—underscoring that Rockefeller's federal engagement is grant-funded research execution, not service contracting. The institution's federal footprint is decidedly post-award: it negotiates research agreements, manages subcontracts with academic and national-lab collaborators, executes complex multi-site experiments (including animal models, clinical cohorts, and high-throughput genomics), and publishes peer-reviewed results aligned with NIH mission priorities rather than procurement cycles or performance-based metrics typical of federal IT or defense contracting.