University Of Alabama At Birmingham

University Of Alabama At Birmingham (doing business as U A B), a state-controlled nonprofit research university and academic medical center headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, is a prime recipient of federal research grants and a service provider under federal contracts across biomedical research, clinical services, and educational programs. U A B operates as a research institution (84% of recent awards are prime positions) and competes in full-and-open procurements without set-aside designation across NIH, Department of Defense, NSF, and other federal agencies.

U A B's federal footprint centers on basic and translational biomedical research spanning neuroscience, oncology, immunology, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, and aging. The institution holds a diverse grant portfolio funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health—the Department of Health and Human Services National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute (310 awards, $436.9 million combined potential value), the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (414 awards, $352.6 million), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (329 awards, $283.3 million) dominate by dollar value. Representative work includes a $22.1 million NASA delivery order for design, development, test and evaluation of the Lunar Freezer System for returning temperature-critical science payloads from the lunar surface; a $4.7 million Defense Health Agency grant investigating autoantibody reduction therapy for progressive idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis; a $1.8 million National Institute of Mental Health award to develop novel preclinical models of neuroHIV incorporating antiretroviral therapy suppression dynamics; and a $754 thousand National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant conducting a randomized trial of remote blood pressure monitoring and pharmacist-led telehealth for hypertension management in emergency department transitional care. On the services side, U A B operates as a clinical service provider under Veterans Health Administration contracts, holding a $926,529 purchase order for critical care transportation serving VA beneficiaries in Birmingham and surrounding regions through 2031, and numerous smaller clinical service agreements with VISN 7 for cardiology, research services, and animal per diem rates.

Customer concentration is moderate across the NIH ecosystem. The top five customer agencies (all within NIH and the VA) account for 37% of recent award count and 45% of combined potential value. The National Cancer Institute leads by dollars; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute leads by count. The 206 distinct customer agencies indicate broad federal engagement. Recent contract activity shows 473 awards (combined potential value $44.6 million) reaching ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months, representing recompete exposure across NIH grant programs, DOD research initiatives, and VA clinical service contracts. U A B's top parent vehicles by task-order volume are Navy IDIQs (N0018908GZ249 carrying 97 task orders for $4.6 million; N0018918GZ005 carrying 75 task orders for $6.1 million), reflecting intermittent but recurring Navy research support. The institution's highest-value vehicles are NIH research grant programs and single-award IDIQs (notably the NASA Lunar Freezer System IDIQ and NIAID antimicrobial activity assessment contract). SCI-reported invoiced revenue on federal services contracts captured above the $150,000 threshold totaled $35.3 million across FY2022–FY2025 (prime records only); the dataset reflects 64.8 FTEs in FY2022 declining to 11.3 FTEs in FY2025, though this reflects only a subset of U A B's federal service activity and does not represent the institution's total federal or enterprise revenue. Median government-paid rates on SCI-reportable contracts ran around $102.56/hr, with senior labor pricing reaching the 90th percentile of $651.93/hr, consistent with academic medical center labor models. U A B's subcontractor engagement on SCI-reportable prime contracts was minimal (0% average sub-hours share), indicating that U A B builds its delivery teams internally rather than relying on subcontractor capacity. On the sub side, U A B subcontracts research and clinical services to larger institutional primes including the University of Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Duke University, and Emory University across multisite NIH-funded trials, epidemiologic cohorts, and clinical research programs, acting as a regional research node within larger national research consortia.