News

Colleges With the Highest Numbers of Principal Investigators, FY 2016

Almanac 2018

August 19, 2018

In the public sector, California was the state with the most institutions in the top 25 for the number of principal investigators leading research-and-development projects, with five, while New York had the most in the private nonprofit sector, also five. In both sectors, the institution with the most principal investigators in the 2016 fiscal year was far ahead of the rest of the pack.

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Public institutions

Rank	Institution	Principal investigators	Other R&D employees	Total R&D employees
1.	U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor	4,874	16,076	20,950
2.	Pennsylvania State U. at University Park and Hershey Medical Center^a	3,017	10,305	13,322
3.	Texas A&M U. at College Station and Health Science Center	2,876	10,120	12,996
4.	U. of Wisconsin at Madison	2,821	14,326	17,147
5.	U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities	2,724	11,379	14,103
6.	Colorado State U. at Fort Collins^a	2,635	6,558	9,193
7.	U. of Washington	2,458	11,914	14,372
8.	U. of California at Los Angeles	2,216	9,532	11,748
9.	Ohio State U.	1,964	7,368	9,332
10.	U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	1,858	7,530	9,388
11.	U. of Pittsburgh main campus	1,856	7,193	9,049
12.	U. of California at Berkeley	1,842	7,913	9,755
13.	U. of California at Davis	1,806	8,917	10,723
14.	U. of Florida^b	1,735	8,009	9,744
15.	U. of Kentucky	1,558	4,018	5,576
16.	U. of California at San Diego	1,555	9,190	10,745
17.	U. of South Florida	1,503	2,694	4,197
18.	U. of Arizona	1,464	6,420	7,884
19.	Purdue U. at West Lafayette	1,443	8,633	10,076
20.	Rutgers U. at New Brunswick^b	1,394	6,436	7,830
21.	U. of California at Irvine	1,326	3,225	4,551
22.	U. of Maryland at College Park	1,312	8,957	10,269
23.	Georgia Institute of Technology^a	1,263	7,240	8,503
24.	U. of Colorado at Boulder	1,251	1,840	3,091
25.	Indiana U. at Bloomington	1,238	6,122	7,360
	Median for 393 institutions	85	362	456

Private nonprofit institutions

Rank	Institution	Principal investigators	Other R&D employees	Total R&D employees
1.	Johns Hopkins U.^b^c	3,089	20,302	23,391
2.	Cornell U.	1,738	8,691	10,429
3.	Stanford U.	1,724	7,752	9,476
4.	U. of Pennsylvania	1,665	10,914	12,579
5.	Duke U.	1,566	7,982	9,548
6.	Emory U.	1,400	5,960	7,360
7.	Washington U. in St. Louis	1,368	6,442	7,810
8.	Columbia U.	1,334	7,892	9,226
9.	New York U.	1,265	5,462	6,727
10.	Yale U.	1,259	7,166	8,425
11.	Northwestern U.	1,196	6,751	7,947
12.	Harvard U.	1,131	6,442	7,573
13.	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	994	8,984	9,978
14.	Vanderbilt U.^b	947	5,215	6,162
15.	U. of Southern California	927	5,762	6,689
16.	U. of Rochester	904	3,422	4,326
17.	George Washington U.	892	1,905	2,797
18.	Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai	859	2,058	2,917
19.	Case Western Reserve U.	842	2,180	3,022
20.	U. of Miami	752	3,077	3,829
21.	Baylor College of Medicine	722	4,625	5,347
22.	Boston U.	695	3,316	4,011
23.	U. of Chicago	677	4,083	4,760
24.	Wake Forest U.	624	1,192	1,816
25.	Brown U.^b	540	2,899	3,439
	Median for 247 institutions	33	124	168

^a The numbers of other and total R&D employees were imputed.

^b The numbers of principal investigators, other R&D employees, and total R&D employees were imputed.

^c Figures for Johns Hopkins University includes the Applied Physics Laboratory, an affiliated independent nonprofit research center, which had 13,116 R&D employees in the 2016 fiscal year.

Note: Principal investigators are employees designated by their institutions to oversee research-and-development projects or programs and to be responsible for those projects’ scientific and technical direction. Co-investigators who share such responsibilities are also counted in that category. Other R&D employees include all other personnel and students paid from research-and-development accounts no matter how much they received. Missing data were imputed based on the previous year’s data and the reported data of peer institutions in the current survey cycle. More data can be found here. Questions or comments on the Almanac should be sent to the Almanac editor.

Source: National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Higher Education Research and Development Survey; Chronicle analysis