Texas A&M FY19 Research Expenditures Top $952 Million

Texas A&M University generated $952 million in total research expenditures during fiscal year 2019, an increase of $30 million, or 3.25 percent, from fiscal year 2018, the Division of Research announced today.

Among funding sources, the largest increase for fiscal year 2019 came from federal funds totaling $359 million, an increase of $26 million, or 7.2 percent, over fiscal year 2018. In addition to being the largest increase, federal funding also was the fiscal year’s largest source of funding— making up 38 percent of total research expenditures — followed by institutional funds with ($275 million, or 29 percent, and state-and-local government funds with $190 million, or 20 percent.

Vice President for Research Mark A. Barteau praised Texas A&M’s researchers for their efforts to grow the breadth and impact of Texas A&M’s research.

“As a land-, sea-, and space-grant university, we are charged with discovering and developing solutions to the global problems that pose the greatest challenges to our society and our planet,” Barteau said. “Our research activities go from the ocean floor to the depths of space, from the behavior of atoms and molecules to the well-being of plants, animals and humans. This scale of research requires significant investments from government, industry and other sources. The competition for these investments is fierce. Our university benefits tremendously in this arena from the strong reputation and hard work of our world-class researchers and their teams.”

Texas A&M recently submitted its fiscal year 2019 research expenditures to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey, which NSF is expected to release in fall 2020. The university’s total annual research expenditures include figures from the flagship campus in College Station, its campus in Galveston and Texas A&M University System agencies.

In its most recent HERD survey released in November 2019, the NSF ranked Texas A&M 20th among 912 U.S. degree-granting colleges and universities and 11th among all public institutions in the United States based on Texas A&M’s annual research expenditures of $922 million for fiscal 2018.

Texas A&M also ranked third in NSF funding, with $114 million that fiscal year.

The NSF HERD survey is an annual census of all known eligible U.S. institutions that expended at least $150,000 in separately accounted for research and development in the fiscal year. The latest survey found that U.S. universities recorded a total of $79.4 billion in research and development expenditures in fiscal 2018, an increase of 5.5 percent from fiscal 2017’s total of $75.3 billion. This marked the third consecutive year for steady funding growth, the survey said.

Johns Hopkins University led the latest survey with $2.7 billion in expenditures, followed by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with $1.6 billion and the University of California, San Francisco, with $1.6 billion.

Among other Texas-based universities ranked in the top 50, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center ranked 19th on the latest survey with $930 million; the University of Texas at Austin, 36th with $680 million; and the Baylor College of Medicine, 40th with $623 million.