2025 Research Funding is sponsored by University of Illinois Chicago. Provides research funding opportunities for faculty and students at the University of Illinois Chicago.

2025 Research Funding | Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research | University of Illinois Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago received $490. 7 million in research funding during the 2025 fiscal year, led by significant gains in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, the School of Public Health, the College of Applied Health Sciences and the College of Engineering.

Awards from federal, state and private sources sponsored over 3,400 projects on research topics including health care, transportation, tele-robotic surgery, education and climate science. The first quarter of fiscal year 2026, which closed on September 30, was a record Q1, with a total of $214 million in awards.

This includes a $33 million State of Illinois capital funding grant to the College of Medicine to establish a community healthcare center on Chicago’s southwest side. in sponsored awards received. in research expenditures.

active sponsored projects. funding increase since 2019. of total funding came from federal sponsors.

As Chicago’s only public research university, UIC is making critical contributions to the innovation economy of Chicago, our state, our nation and indeed the world. UIC will continue to advance research that addresses some of society’s most vexing challenges while elevating the quality of life for the many wonderful communities we serve.

Chancellor, University of Illinois Chicago UIC received 76% of its research funding from federal sponsors. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agencies awarded $250. 4 million, including $201.

4 million from the National Institutes of Health. U.S. Department of Energy funding increased to $36. 3 million, U.S. Department of Defense funding increased to $22.

9 million and the National Science Foundation awarded UIC $27. 9 million. Other top government sponsors included the State of Illinois, which awarded $53.

7 million, up 16% from fiscal year 2024. Private and industry sponsors, such as the American Heart Association, Apple and Bloomberg Philanthropies, awarded $61. 3 million to UIC for research ranging from nutrition policy to cancer treatment.

In addition to the $490. 7 million in research funding, the UIC Office of Technology Management reported $5. 6 million in funding from 304 active licenses of its intellectual property.

Funding Sources by College/School Our steady numbers in research funding reflect the breadth and depth of research at UIC, as well as the resilience of our research community. In the face of challenges, UIC researchers continue to make the discoveries that change people’s lives.

Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Illinois Chicago Top UIC Projects Funded in FY25 AI Innovations for Patient Care UIC faculty members Mary Khetani, Tanvi Bhatt, Andrew Boyd and Samantha Bond An AI initiative to collect and analyze healthcare data from multiple providers , was awarded $9. 8 million from the Advanced Research Project Agency-Health — UIC’s first ARPA-H grant.

Researchers will create new ways to combine structured data and free-text notes from nurses, physical and occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists and physicians for more effective use in electronic health records. The initiative will create new datasets to positively impact care for patients recovering from falls and infants transitioning home from the neonatal intensive care unit.

Illinois Gateway Traveler Information System Illinois Gateway Traveler Information System John Dillenburg, co-principal investigator A $5. 9 million award from the Illinois Department of Transportation will be used to research, develop and operate the Illinois Gateway Traveler Information System , an interactive website providing precise, real-time traffic information.

Interactive maps developed through the IDOT-UIC partnership provide travelers with information regarding travel times, congestion, construction, incidents, road labels and shields, dynamic message signs, cameras and special events. The research contract supports 16 full-time staff and more than 15 part-time staff and students. Teachers share math instruction skills as part of a Learning Sciences Research Institute project.

The Learning to Lead in Math Project, funded by $4. 3 million from the U.S. Department of Education, will work with K-8 principals and teachers to support professional development and collaboration on math instruction. Over the next five years, the project team will work with schools in west and south Cook County to implement the program.

Professional development and coaching will be provided by the Metro Chicago Mathematics Initiative , also in UIC’s Learning Sciences Research Institute. Center for Climate Health Excellence Center for Climate Health Excellence Green infrastructure, such as parks and groves of trees, can reduce street-level temperatures and heat exposure. The Center for Climate Health Excellence , awarded $3.

9 million from the National Institutes of Health, will gather researchers to study and mitigate the effects of flooding, pollution and heat on health in Chicago communities. The center will build on several existing UIC programs, including the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative and the Community Research on Climate & Urban Science project, a partnership with Argonne National Laboratory and several Midwestern universities.

The center also will leverage resources and ongoing work at the Chicago Center for Health and the Environment, housed at UIC and the University of Chicago. Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative “ Crossing Latinidades: Emerging Scholars and New Comparative Directions ” was awarded $578,080 from The Andrew W.

Mellon Foundation as part of a three-year, $5 million grant awarded in 2024. The initiative brings together faculty and doctoral students from across the country to spark comparative research and generate new scholarship in Latino humanities. In recent cohorts, nearly all fellows have advanced to doctoral candidacy, building a stronger national pipeline of scholars in the humanities and advancing the field of Latino humanities studies.

Recognizing UIC Faculty Members Nine UIC researchers received National Science Foundation CAREER awards, a prestigious grant for early career development: Lu Cheng and Wei Tang from the department of computer science in the College of Engineering Philip Engel and Caroline Terry from the department of math, statistics and computer science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Arman Roohi and Benjamin Sanchez Terrones from the department of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering Mohammad Ghashami and Erica Jung from the department of mechanical and industrial engineering in the College of Engineering Andy Nguyen from the department of chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Read about the UIC faculty members who received the most research funding in 2025.

Andy Boyd (Applied Health Sciences) Professor of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Chief Research Information Officer | College of Applied Health Sciences Andy Boyd, MD is a professor in the Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). His postdoctoral work was in biomedical informatics at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Boyd’s research focuses on “data simplification to improve clinical outcomes” engaging administrators, researchers and patients. His recent research success was in simplifying the transition for International Classification of Disease version 9 clinical modification (ICD-9-CM) to version 10 (ICD-10-CM), which occurred on Oct. 1, 2015.

Over 200 news publications have cited his work including Crain’s Chicago Business, Modern Health Care, Healthcare Informatics, Politco. com, Inside Health Policy and many more. Another area of data simplification to improve clinical outcomes is the vocabulary differences between health professions.

Novel ways of integrating health concepts allow the designing new patient engagement programs to reflect all of patient care. The concept is to transform the data from the electronic health record system to engage patients in their own care to improve health.

Jerry Krishnan (Public Health) Professor of Medicine and Public Health, Associate Vice Chancellor for Population Health Sciences | School of Public Health Dr. Krishnan is a physician-scientist with expertise in the care of patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other complex obstructive lung disorders.

Dr. Krishnan is an expert in care delivery science and co-directs the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design. He is an investigator in National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute-funded research networks and is conducting studies to identify new treatment strategies for patients with asthma and COPD.

Dr. Krishnan served as a member of the Pulmonary-Allergy Drugs Advisory Committee for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2007-2012 (Chair, 2011-2012), the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Respiratory Measurement Advisory Panel (2010- 2015), and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Clinical Trials Review Committee (2012- 2017; Chair 2016-17).

Peter Nelson (Engineering) Professor of Computer Science | College of Engineering Professor Nelson’s research at UIC in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has focused on developing efficient artificial intelligence (AI) search techniques.

This research has two components: basic research into developing general, efficient heuristic search algorithms, and applied research and development using heuristic search and other AI methods to solve problems in the areas of transportation, manufacturing, bioinformatics and high-availability computer clusters.

Amanda Lewis (Liberal Arts and Sciences) LAS Distinguished Professor, Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Amanda E. Lewis is the Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Her research focuses on how race shapes educational opportunities and on how our ideas about race get negotiated in everyday life.

She is the author of several award-winning books including, with co-author John Diamond, Despite the Best Intentions: Why racial inequality persists in good schools ( Oxford University Press, 2015 ), and Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the color-line in classrooms and communities ( Rutgers University Press 2003 ).

Her research has appeared in a number of academic venues including Sociological Theory, American Educational Research Journal, American Behavioral Scientist, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Educational Researcher, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Urban Education and The Du Bois Review .

She has received numerous grants and awards including from the National Science Foundation, National Institute o Health, Spencer Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Field Foundation, and the American Sociological Association.

As Director of IRRPP , she has co-authored a number of reports as part of the State of Racial Justice in Chicago project chronicling the experiences and conditions of racial/ethnic groups in the city. Dr. Lewis lectures and consults regularly on issues of racial and educational equity and contemporary forms of racism.

Anne Elizabeth Glassgow, PhD, LCSW Research Associate Professor, Medical Director – UI Health Two-Generation Clinic | College of Medicine Dr. Glassgow is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Division of Academic Internal Medicine and Geriatrics, and Pediatrics. Dr. Glassgow is Co-Principal Investigator of the NIH funded U54 University of Illinois Chicago Maternal Health Research Center of Excellence.

Her research in social epigenetics examines how social experiences and adversity impact biology and increase the risk for disease, poor health and mental health, and ultimately contribute to maternal health disparities. Dr. Glassgow is a Co-Principal Investigator and Project Director of the HRSA funded Illinois Maternal Health Innovation Program, I-PROMOTE-IL.

Dr. Glassgow is the Medical Director of the UI Health Two-Generation Clinic, a clinic she helped develop to improve the health and mental health of postpartum mothers, fathers, and their infants. Dr. Glassgow is a member of the Illinois Maternal Mortality Review Committee on Violent Deaths, a multi-disciplinary board that reviews all pregnancy-associated deaths that are due to homicide, suicide, or unintentional drug overdose.

Dr. Glassgow is passionate about child and adolescent mental health and serves as the Principal Investigator and UIC Lead for the Illinois Department of Public Health HRSA funded Illinois Pediatric Mental Health Care Access Expansion Program. Dr. Glassgow is the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services appointed University Faculty Board Member of the Child Welfare Employee Licensure Board.

Stephen Thomas Bartlett (Medicine) Stephen Thomas Bartlett, MD Visiting Clinical Professor of Surgery | College of Medicine Dr. Stephen Bartlett is a visiting clinical professor of surgery and transplant surgeon at UI Health.

Dr. Bartlett has 35 years’ experience performing kidney transplants, combined kidney-pancreas transplants for patients with kidney failure due to diabetes and pancreas transplants for patients with unstable diabetes.

He has a special interest in patients with complex problems in transplantation, including removal of enlarged kidneys from adult polycystic kidney disease (APKD) and patients with vascular problems impacting transplant eligibility.

Alison Castro Superfine (Liberal Arts and Sciences) Alison Castro Superfine, PhD Director and Professor – Learning Sciences Research Institute, Professor – Mathematics Education & Learning Sciences | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Professor Superfine’s research interests focus primarily on studying and supporting mathematics teacher learning, both practicing and prospective elementary teachers.

Her funded projects include designing and studying learning environments for mathematics teacher preparation courses to support prospective teachers’ development of mathematical knowledge for teaching and professional noticing. Related to mathematics teacher preparation, she has developed different analytic approaches to study mathematics teacher educators and the knowledge needed to teach teachers.

Other funded projects have focused on practicing elementary teachers and their use of learning trajectory-based formative assessment practices, and ways of supporting their learning to engage in productive classroom discourse over time.

Director – Center for Health Behavior Research | School of Public Health Dr. Jun Ma is a professor of academic internal medicine and geriatrics and associate head for research in the Department of Medicine. She also directs IHRP’s Center for Health Behavior Research and is an IHRP Fellow.

With a broad background in preventive medicine, nutritional science, and biometry, she specializes in clinical and translational lifestyle medicine research in primary care and nonmedical community settings. Dr. Ma directs an integrative precision lifestyle medicine and translation research portfolio.

Since 2008, she has secured more than $15 million in NIH and AHRQ funding as the principal investigator of innovative lifestyle intervention research studies that address highly intractable health problems and disparities among racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse adult populations in private mixed-payer, managed care, and public health systems, as well as in communities.

She is one of the principal investigators of PREMIER, an NIH-funded postdoctoral training program for precision lifestyle medicine. Learn more. She has directed the development and publication of new randomization methods and tools, including a Web-based comprehensive system for minimization methods.

In addition to her experience leading experimental research, ranging from pilot randomized studies to multicenter pragmatic trials, she has often published on national patterns of outpatient care quality and disparities in lifestyle-related physical and mental health disorders using complex population survey data, such as the National Ambulatory Care Surveys and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

In January 2017, Dr. Ma was elected to the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research , an international honorary society recognizing senior scientists for their research excellence in behavioral medicine.

Before joining the UIC faculty in 2015, Dr. Ma was a senior scientist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute and a consulting professor in Stanford University’s Department of Medicine, with which she continues to collaborate on research. She is a Fellow of the American Heart Association and serves on the AHA Council on Epidemiology and Prevention and the AHA Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health.

Dr. Ma earned her doctorate in nutritional sciences from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and her medical degree from West China University of Medical Sciences in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, with an emphasis in preventive medicine.

Kristen Malecki (Public Health) Kristen Malecki, PhD, MPH Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, EOHS Division Director | School of Public Health Kristen Malecki, PhD, MPH is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (EOHS) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), School of Public Health, where she also serves as the EOHS Division Director.

She has a PhD in Environmental Epidemiology and Health Policy and Masters of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was recently appointed to the National Academies of Sciences standing committee on the “Use of Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions .

” She uses a multi-omic approach to examine combined chemical (air pollution, water pollution), physical and social stressors, and their influence on adult chronic disease, aging and health disparities.)

As a former member of the Molecular Environmental Toxicology Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and her transdisciplinary work uses epigenetics, transcriptomics in both human and animals studies of the gut microbiome and to identify interim biomarkers of exposure and response to improve understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying persistent health disparities.

Prior to coming to UIC, she served as the PI for the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin Cohort study in Wisconsin, a novel infrastructure for ongoing population health science research. She also maintains longstanding partnerships with state and national public health partners which has facilitated a breadth of applied public health initiatives.

Before becoming an academic, she served as the lead epidemiologist for the State of Wisconsin Environmental Public Health Tracking Program. In these roles she gained extensive experience in leading and managing multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in development of new approaches to addressing environmental and occupational health challenges.

She currently serves as PI for the National Coordinate Center for New Cohorts for Environmental Exposures and Cancer Research (CEECR) funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences as well as the Researching Epigenetics, Weathering, Aging and Residential Disadvantage (REWARD) funded by the National Institutes of Aging and is a member and Director for the Translational Research Core of the Chicago Center for Health and the Environment a collaborative NIEHS funded environmental health center including partnerships between UIC and the University of Chicago.

She is also PI of the NIH funded Center for Climate Health Equity a pilot center supporting innovative climate and health research and nature based solutions for advancing climate and health research.

Professor, Interim Department Head – Department of Pharmacology & Regenerative Medicine | College of Medicine Professor Mehta’s lab investigates interactive signaling between non-phagocytic (i.e., endothelial cells) and phagocytic cells (i.e., monocytes/macrophages) in regulating tissue function.

She seeks to understand how stressors (such as ligands for G-protein coupled receptors or toll-like receptors) on these cell types trigger metabolic and epigenetic changes to alter tissue function under physiological setting versus pathological (i.e., cancer) settings.

Investigate the non-canonical function of the tumor suppressor, PTEN, in generating a reparative and anti-inflammatory population of endothelial cells that maintain normal tissue function. Investigate the role of focal adhesion kinase (FAK) in maintaining cellular tension and epigenetics. Determine mechanisms inducing the synthesis of GPCR, S1PR1, and how it determines physiological versus pathological angiogenesis.

Investigate the role of S1P and cAMP metabolism in macrophages in dictating tissue macrophage phenotype and inflammatory function. Her research focuses on the impact of incarceration and community reentry on families and children, as well as social welfare policies and services for aging populations.