Johns Hopkins University will significantly expand financial supports for faculty, students, and research teams facing federal grant terminations or delays, or dealing with the broader effects of a changing research ecosystem, the university announced today.
Via its new Research Resilience Fund, the university will earmark $60 million annually over the next two years to support faculty as they embark on new research or academic endeavors, as well as PhD students and postdocs as they complete their studies. The program spans all of the research domains where the university has in the past benefited from competitively awarded federal funding.
The announcement comes against a backdrop of precipitous declines in federal support for research as the government pivots from the historic partnership with the nation's research universities that has fueled America's research enterprise for more than 80 years.
"We have repeatedly sought to call attention to the benefits of this extraordinary collaboration for countless people across the country and around the world: economic prosperity, healthier lives, and national and global security," JHU President Ron Daniels wrote in a message to the university community today. "And we will continue, both individually and collectively, to advocate for the protection of the American model of competitive, meritocratic federal research investment.
"We know it is not possible to make up fully the scale of federal research funding traditionally received at Hopkins, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. But that is not to say that we are entirely without agency to mitigate the impact of this contraction in funding."
The Research Resilience Fund is made possible through budgetary reallocation, including savings achieved through a variety of cost-reduction measures, as well as $8.5 million in research funding from the State of Maryland. Its creation marks an expansion of the previous Pivot and Bridge Program, which was created in April 2025 and funded at $12.5 million annually. With this increased investment via the Research Resilience Fund, the university can substantially increase the number of awards—42 awards were made last year via the Pivot and Bridge Program—raise the per-award cap to $250,000, and eliminate the divisional or departmental matching requirement.
Awards will be subject to a streamlined merit-based review process and may be applied to salary coverage as well as research projects. More details about award criteria and the application process will be available soon on the Provost's Office website.
Additionally, to increase JHU's capacity to support research, the university will commit to several revenue-generating and cost-saving actions, Daniels wrote. This includes building new corporate research partnerships, adding online and non-degree educational offerings, reducing administrative expenses, seeking solutions to curtail the rising costs of employee benefits, identifying operational efficiencies across the research enterprise, and reducing spending on capital projects.
"If we are to flourish as a community devoted to ideas and service to society, we will have to summon the wherewithal and indomitable can-do spirit that lies at the core of our identity as America's first research university," Daniels wrote.
"As we move forward together, please know how vital your work is to our university community and, most importantly, to every person whose life is touched by the impactful discoveries that Johns Hopkins has brought to the world."
