Trinity University

Trinity University, a private non-profit educational institution based in San Antonio, Texas, operates as a prime recipient and contractor for federal research grants and military professional education delivery, competing on full-and-open basis with no set-aside designations across its portfolio.

The university's federal footprint centers on two distinct capability areas. The primary activity is professional military education: Trinity delivers the U.S. Army Captains Career Course through an Indefinite Delivery Contract with Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) valued at $4.49 million through June 2027, under which multiple delivery orders have funded three-week officer-development courses at its Olmos Park, Texas facility. A $13,337 purchase order from Army South (May 2026) supported a deactivation ceremony. The secondary capability is federally funded research across biomedical sciences, geosciences, chemistry, physics, and engineering disciplines, with Trinity acting as prime recipient on NSF project grants and other federal research awards, and as sub-recipient on collaborative grants led by institutions including Texas Biomedical Research Institute, St. Mary's University of San Antonio, New York University, the University of Michigan, and the Planetary Science Institute.

Customer concentration tracks heavily toward the Army. The Department of the Army accounts for 33 awards and dominates potential-value rankings: TRADOC anchors the portfolio with 9 awards ($11.6 million combined potential value), while Army Headquarters and the Installation Management Command Southwest Region add $4.5 million and $3.1 million respectively. The National Science Foundation leads by award count (49 awards) but carries lower average award magnitude — the top five customer agencies by award count represent 58% of recent awards. NASA's Shared Services Center, the Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Education, and the Air Force round out the active set across smaller award volumes. Over the past five years, Trinity's award volume has remained volatile (ranging from 1 to 12 awards annually, with 9 in 2026), reflecting the lumpy nature of both research grant cycles and military training contracts. Eleven awards are scheduled to complete in the next twenty-four months, carrying combined potential value of $294 thousand — a modest recompete exposure relative to the TRADOC IDC anchor.

Trinity's vehicle position is anchored by the TRADOC Indefinite Delivery Contract and two Army Basic Ordering Agreements: BOA DAKF1979H0098 supports 23 task orders (primarily facility rental and course delivery), and BOA F3360080D0518 carries 4 task orders under Air Force contracting. Recent research awards operate outside standing IDVs — the $750,000 NSF high-performance computing equipment grant (August 2026), $294,476 NASA balanced science program grant (February 2026), $210,670 NSF geosciences award for sandstone strain modeling in Utah (July 2026), and $535,867 National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant for synthetic protein receptors (September 2025) exemplify the scope. Trinity also subcontracts on collaborative research: the university provides Luminex assay services on New York University's primate biomarker grant, supplies undergraduate mentorship and STEM learning community coordination under St. Mary's University LSAMP leadership grants, and performs numerical modeling and outreach on a Planetary Science Institute ring-dynamics project. Grant-recipient work includes McNair Scholars programming (Department of Education), collaborative housing-stability and youth-homelessness research (NSF Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences), and medieval textual scholarship (National Endowment for the Humanities).

The award portfolio reflects a primarily undergraduate institution's research identity: the top NAICS codes are Lessors of Nonresidential Buildings (36 awards, driven by facility-rental line items against the TRADOC contract), Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools (17 awards), and Professional and Management Development Training (4 awards). Top PSC codes align — Education/Training Tuition/Registration (45 awards), Education/Training Reserve Training Military (12 awards), and facility lease-rent categories (16 combined awards). This classification structure underscores that Trinity's federal value proposition flows from provision of space, faculty-led research infrastructure, and workforce development rather than from developed IP or scalable service delivery models characteristic of commercial contractors.