UC San Diego's La Jolla campus pulled in nearly $1.8 billion in research funding during fiscal year 2026, its highest total ever, even as the number of new grants awarded to researchers fell by 179 compared to the prior year.
New awards dropped from 1,925 in FY25 to 1,746 in FY26. Federal sources still made up 62% of total funding, a 19% increase over the previous year, according to the university's annual report. Including continuing grants, UCSD maintained 5,591 active awards.
Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation Corinne Peek-Asa said the rising dollar total alongside fewer new grants shows UCSD researchers are "winning larger, highly competitive awards." But she cautioned that the outlook is uncertain.
"It is impossible to operate a leading research team without predictable funding," Peek-Asa told the San Diego Union-Tribune, describing the funding environment as "more volatile and more competitive."
La Jolla labs land marquee grants
The single largest award went to Shaochen Chen, a 3D bioprinting expert and professor of chemical and nano engineering at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. His lab received up to $25.8 million over five years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to develop a fully functional, patient-specific 3D-printed liver. Of that total, $18.3 million arrived during FY26.
At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Director Emeritus Margaret Leinen's team received $15 million from the Fund for Science and Technology, a new private foundation funded by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. The grant supports analysis of environmental DNA shed by organisms in understudied ocean regions, expansion of Deep Argo floats that explore depths up to 6,000 meters and early-stage research on melting rates of Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier.
UCSD's newly launched Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections, co-directed by political science professors Thad Kousser and Lauren Prather, received approximately $2.5 million from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Election Trust Initiative to build partnerships with election officials nationwide.
A volatile pipeline
The pattern is not new. In FY24, UCSD reported $1.73 billion in awards while the number of new grants also declined slightly. But the scale has accelerated.
In March 2025, Peek-Asa warned the San Diego County Board of Supervisors that UCSD projected a $150 million hit from changes to NIH reimbursement rules. San Diego is the nation's third-largest NIH recipient. The county board later voted in May 2026 to support SB 895, a proposed $23 billion state research bond aimed at countering federal cuts.
One concrete gain for La Jolla faculty: in June 2026, a $5 million NIH grant restored UCSD's Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, which had been canceled in 2025 due to federal budget cuts. The reinstatement created 12 tenure-track positions in the life sciences.
