LSU sets historic record for research activity at $488 Million

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Last year, LSU announced a momentous jump in research activity in 2022, eclipsing the $400 million milestone across its eight campuses, achieving $428 million statewide. Today’s updated numbers for 2023 show combined research activity at $488 million—almost $500 million. This remarkable uptick represents a 14 percent increase for the LSU family, above the university’s aspirational goal of growing its collaborative research enterprise 10 percent year to year.

University research activity is measured through expenditures. Spending across projects provides the most reliable data point to indicate success in research. While the monies spent primarily come from grants and contracts, expenditures are the better measurement of sustained effort and operational capacity. Large awards for big projects, lasting sometimes several years, would otherwise appear as wins only when first announced. Expenditures, meanwhile, show how those wins translate into continuous investment with broad economic impacts for the state—LSU’s 2023 research activity added $1.3 billion for Louisiana.

American research universities are ranked by their ability to compete for federal funding. The National Science Foundation, or NSF, is expected to confirm LSU’s numbers and provide an updated national ranking around November 2024. Because LSU’s campuses have operated as separate legal entities, the university’s current ranking is based only on its Baton Rouge campuses—the flagship, the AgCenter and LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center—which between 2022 and 2023 saw a 12 percent increase in research activity, from $344 million to $384 million. LSU is currently engaged in a university-wide effort to combine its statewide research numbers, allowing its full research capacity to be shared with the NSF through the agency’s annual Higher Education Research and Development, or HERD, survey.

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