The University of Vermont has leveled up when it comes to its standing as a research institution.
The college announced on Thursday that it’s joining 187 other universities in being considered a R1 institution, a designation given by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The R1 category — short for Research 1 — is for institutions with “very high research spending and doctorate production.”
This puts the university in a position to attract and retain more talented early-career researchers and make grants look more appealing to funders, according to administrators.
“Being out on the road (recruiting), the first thing you’re asked by an early-career faculty member with a good resume is, ‘Are you R1?’” said Kirk Dombrowski, the vice president of research and economic development at the university. “When potential graduate students come to see if they’ll like a PhD program, they say to us ‘Are you R1?’”
Now, the university can answer “yes” — an answer it hopes can help researchers see the university as a place where they can build a robust professional career on-par with what they could do at any of the nation’s best research hubs.
Part of why the designation helps bolster the institution so much is because it elevates the status of researchers’ grants, according to Richard Page, the dean of the university’s Larner College of Medicine.
“Every time someone writes a grant, the environment is one of the categories that’s assessed. Being R1 takes it to another level,” Page said. It ensures a researcher’s “ability to make the case that (the National Institutes of Health) or other funding agencies or foundations are going to invest and believe that the science can be accomplished here.”
The designation comes as the Trump administration’s attempts to pause federal research funding through the National Institutes of Health and other grant-making agencies have cast scientific institutions into limbo and uncertainty about the future. The Larner College of Medicine garnered more than $100 million in research grants in 2024 — $50 million of that comes from the National Institutes of Health, Page said.
Yet administrators and researchers were undeterred by the uncertainty surrounding research funding. Federal court injunctions on the president’s attempt to stop funding have allowed things to continue as normal for the university, Dombrowski said.
“We don’t actually have any formal bank cancellations yet. We’re at full speed,” he said. “A lot of it is performative rhetoric. We haven’t seen the concrete pieces, and when we do, we’ll adjust.”
The R1 label is, in part, a recognition of the massive growth in annual research funding that the university has seen. Since 2020, that number has more than doubled, according to a University of Vermont press release issued Thursday. The university claims $260 million in external research funding, $100 million of which the Larner College of Medicine has brought in.
“We have to be able to show that we have this competitive ecosystem. Vermont has a lot to offer,” Dombrowski said. “People want to be here. It’s amazing, but it’s not (amazing) for a professional career. People don’t look at this and say ‘I can have the same professional career I can have in Boston.’ And we have to show them they can.”
Jessica Crothers grew up in Woodstock and attended the University of Vermont for her undergraduate degree, medical school and residency — and in the meantime, she met her husband and started a family. She now works as an assistant professor of pathology and runs a lab investigating polio vaccine trials at the university.
“I’ve been able to pursue such groundbreaking research at such a high level while staying near my family in Vermont, near my community and raising my child here,” Crothers said. “Balancing those things — your personal needs in life and your research dreams — is a challenge for a lot of people”
With the designation, she imagines more researchers could see UVM as a viable option to strike that same balance.
Dombrowski also hopes that it will allow the university not only to attract new talent but also to hold onto talented minds it has already built.
“We have a high proportion of out-of-state students, but how do we make this the place those graduates want to stay?” he said.
The question of how to make Vermont “stickier,” in Dombrowski’s words, for its young people has long plagued the state.
He sees success in retaining talented researchers as having downstream impacts for the rest of the state, citing that every dollar invested in Vermont’s research endeavors yields $3 of economic growth for the state.
Page sees room for even more growth. Next, he hopes that UVM can reclaim its designation as a National Cancer Institute center, which the university lost in 2008.
“I don’t know what the future will hold tomorrow or next week, but the need to provide world-class training in research, the need to address the local and national and international issues in health, will remain,” Page said. “The need to train the next generation of doctors and PhD scientists and (Master of Public Health) scientists will continue.”
