The University Of Chicago

The University of Chicago, a private tax-exempt research university in Chicago, Illinois, operates as a prime recipient and prime contractor on federal grants and contracts across basic research, applied research, and educational services delivered to 213 distinct federal agencies. The institution competes full-and-open, holds no SBA set-asides, and delivers research and education services grounded in biomedical sciences, physical sciences, engineering, and computational methods.

University of Chicago's federal footprint spans 6,402 awards (5,513 as prime, 889 as sub) with combined potential value of $833.2 million and obligated dollars of $28.35 billion—a ratio reflecting multi-year research grants and research contracts that renew incrementally across decades. Recent activity shows 556 awards in 2024, declining to 468 in 2025 and 156 through mid-2026, driven by the multi-year grant cycle: awards with ultimate completion in the next twenty-four months total 463, representing a $76.1 million recompete exposure. The institution's customer concentration centers on the National Institutes of Health—primarily the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (267 awards, $261.1 million), the National Cancer Institute (310 awards, $211.7 million), and the broader NIH portfolio (725 awards, $12 million)—alongside NASA's Shared Services Center (290 awards, $91.7 million) and the National Science Foundation (1,003 awards). These five entities account for approximately 41 percent of recent award count and 72 percent of combined potential value.

The institution's capability portfolio centers on peer-reviewed biomedical research, life sciences, materials science, quantum computing, and data science delivered through federal grant mechanisms (primarily NIH, NSF, and DoD programs) and research contract vehicles. Representative grant work includes a $6.51 million four-year NIH NIDDK award investigating macrophage roles in weight loss and adipose tissue inflammation; a $2.59 million NIH NIA award (PARDOS APEX) examining environmental pollution exposure and Alzheimer's disease pathology across 2,500 deceased Brazilians; a $2.54 million NSF award for AI-augmented conversational assistants for cloud research infrastructure; and a $1.9 million NIH NIGMS award on myosin-10 molecular mechanisms. The institution also executes contract-based research through a $1.25 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Other Transaction IDV awarded July 28, 2025, for the "Right Space - PDE to SDP" program, and serves as a subcontractor on applied research: for example, a sub-award to Sri International on the Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection (PWND2) program and a sub-award to the University of Pennsylvania's CEIRR (Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response) for longitudinal epidemiological and evolutionary modeling.

Service Contract Inventory captures a partial, reported view of the institution's service-contract federal work: SCI-reported invoicing totaled $40.9 million across FY2022–FY2024 (FY2022: $22.5 million, 115 FTEs; FY2023: $11.2 million, 32.6 FTEs; FY2024: $7.2 million, 38.4 FTEs). These SCI figures are strict subsets of the institution's total federal research revenue and do not represent company-wide revenue. Government-paid rates on SCI-reportable prime service contracts ranged from $78.83/hr (10th percentile) to $299.68/hr (90th percentile), with a median of $143.62/hr. Across SCI-reportable prime contracts, subcontractors accounted for an average of six percent of total contractor hours, with six named subs identified.

The institution operates 86 percent of recent awards as prime and 14 percent as sub. Named sub-awards and collaborative partnerships reflect research-intensive, high-impact work: sub-awards cite Northwestern University (30+ collaborative awards in cancer research, cardiovascular research, neuroscience, and data science initiatives), the University of Pennsylvania (Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response, epidemiological modeling), Cornell University, Emory University, and others. The corporate structure includes The University of Chicago Medical Center and subsidiary research entities including Center for Research in Security Prices LLC and University of Chicago Research Bangladesh LLC.

The institution's vehicle position is anchored in federal grant mechanisms (NSF, NIH, DoD) rather than commercial IDV vehicles; the top parent vehicles by task-order count are Navy indefinite-delivery contracts and basic ordering agreements (N0014098G2431 with 69 task orders; N0024410G0011 with 20 task orders; N0060079H0294 with 18 task orders), reflecting the institution's education and training role supporting military personnel and naval research programs. The institution does not pursue set-aside categories; it competes on scientific merit under full-and-open authority across peer-review processes managed by federal agencies.