ASU on the cusp of becoming a $1B research university

Editor’s note: This story is featured in the 2024 year in review.

Once a fledgling research school, Arizona State University soon will hit $1 billion in annual research funding, placing the university into a rare category reached by just 33 universities across the nation.

And ASU is one of only a handful of schools to accomplish the feat without a medical school. (The university is in the process of launching one.)

Years in the making, the $1 billion milestone represents ASU’s rapid growth through groundbreaking and impactful research in engineering, microelectronics, space exploration, health care, national defense, sustainability and more. 

Others enjoyed a 200- or 300-year head start, so how did this all come to be when ASU wasn’t even a university until 1958? 

Looking back, ASU made key decisions with programs and people; was able to successfully shake off economic downturns; and weathered the threat of a worldwide pandemic to become a national research powerhouse — all while showing a sharp focus on the future and a willingness to help shape it.

ASU President Michael Crow sees himself as a “knowledge enterprise architect.” As an architect focused on higher education when he first took the reins of Arizona State University in 2002, he saw an opportunity to break the models of the academic past and establish A New American University.

In his “A New Gold Standard” inaugural address, Crow foresaw ASU as a rising research institution vitally linked to its metropolitan surroundings. 

“Today, Arizona State University is poised to become a world-class institution in what is emerging as a dynamic and vibrant world city — the two are inextricably intertwined,” Crow wrote at the time.  

“Arizona State University has established the capacity to become the leading public metropolitan research university for the 21st century, known for its excellence in teaching and research, its innovative interdisciplinary programs, and its direct social engagement.”

More than 20 years later, Crow remains remarkably consistent in implementing that vision, one that left behind the standard university template to instead design an institution guided “not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.”

The goal ever since has been to create a world-class research environment while providing more access to education than ever before. In the last year, ASU has opened its doors to more than 180,000 learners on campus and online while also becoming a research powerhouse. 

Many Arizona leaders were still smarting from the boom-and-bust economic cycles during the late 1980s and 1990s. To safeguard Arizona’s future, they realized that diversifying Arizona’s economic portfolio and investments would be needed to plant the seeds for its future prosperity. 

As Crow quickly began to reshape ASU, he recruited the best and brightest to roll up their sleeves and work alongside to build his sweeping vision of a New American University.

Building the framework to implement this new vision involved investments in bricks and mortar; attracting leading minds and innovative faculty; cooperation at the municipal and state level; and strategic federal, private and philanthropic investments, all interwoven within an entrepreneurial culture to ensure ASU inventions reach society and impact people’s daily lives.

Two key early state investments helped jump-start his vision. The first catalyst came in 2000, when voters approved the Technology and Research Initiative Fund, or TRIF, a publicly funded sales-tax initiative to support research, innovation and workforce development at Arizona's public universities.

TRIF funding supported, and supports, projects and initiatives in health, sustainability, national security, space exploration and workforce development. Programs seeded by TRIF often then attract significant federal and philanthropic funding, recruit exceptional talent, and create new products and businesses that generate high-quality jobs.

In 20 years, TRIF funding at ASU helped attract $3.36 billion in external funding, a threefold return on investment; train more than 23,000 graduate students and postdocs and more than 12,000 undergraduate students; land nearly 1,200 patents; and launch nearly 300 startup companies. The TRIF funding continues to this day, with the proposition extended in 2018 for an additional 20 years.

The second key catalyst came from the Arizona Legislature, which supported a bipartisan university research bill in 2003, allocating $440 million to research facilities at the state's public universities. The first construction projects began at ASU in earnest, including the Biodesign Institute, whose first building — supported by TRIF and the research infrastructure bill — was completed in 2004.

Crow’s first major research investment was to deliberately disrupt the academic status quo within academic silos. ASU committed to investing in the pursuit of use-inspired, world-class research capable of having meaningful social impact.

The Biodesign Institute was deliberately planned as a stand-alone interdisciplinary endeavor outside of any one academic department or school. It focused on use-inspired research and innovation by unlocking the secrets of nature’s grandeur, a critical step toward the billion-dollar milestone.

Joshua LaBaer, director of the Biodesign Institute, has helped to guide and build the institute’s research portfolio, pivoted to face head-on the COVID-19 pandemic and continued the development of new ideas. 

“It’s standing on the edge of human knowledge and facing out into the dark and saying, I want to shed light out there. I want to move out into that unknown space and put knowledge there,” LaBaer said. “That bug bit me hard, and it has never left.”

For LaBaer, a promising local student from Arcadia High School, the science bug began when he went to the University of California, San Francisco to earn his MD and PhD. Later at Harvard, he became leader of the cutting-edge field of proteomics, an endeavor leading to new diagnostics and treatments for human health. He too was drawn to ASU by Crow’s vision, returning to the Valley first to lead a center focused on personalized diagnostics and then to become the Biodesign Institute’s director.

The institute harnessed an interdisciplinary team research approach, imperative to generating new knowledge to tackle the major global health, security and sustainability issues of the 21st century. Since its inception in 2004, Biodesign has received more than $930 million in funding alone. 

Biodesign is part of the reason why ASU has repeatedly ranked at the top of interdisciplinary research in the National Science Foundation’s HERD survey. With its use-inspired focus, Biodesign has had a major impact on the lives of Arizonans.

Biodesign represented the first of many similar efforts at ASU. 

That's when ASU’s early ambitions and results began garnering the attention of academia.

“It is a wonderful thing to be part of a place that is becoming, rather than a place that has been,” said Crow in an influential Nature magazine profile called “The Arizona Experiment,” one of the first major international news spotlights on ASU’s unique research endeavors.

The building cranes haven’t stopped, with the last 20 years serving as the greatest expansion of ASU’s research infrastructure in its history. Millions of square feet of research space have been added, with a 12th Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building soon to be the newest research facility completed at ASU’s Polytechnic campus in 2025.

Crow and former city of Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon once sketched out the future of the Downtown Phoenix campus on a cocktail napkin over a coffee conversation about transforming a parking lot. Now, it’s a campus of 10,000-plus students. ASU’s expanding presence also helped transform Mesa, the West Valley, downtown Los Angeles and more.

SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center, helped turn a former shopping mall into one of the premier economic engines in the Valley. The 42-acre mixed-use development houses Skysong Innovations, formed to handle ASU’s growing research portfolio as ASU’s exclusive technology transfer and intellectual property management organization. Skysong Innovations helps translate research into impact by protecting intellectual property developed in ASU labs and negotiating licensing deals with commercial partners, who advance the patented technologies and develop solutions for society.

ASU consistently ranks in the top 10 for U.S. utility patents issued to universities worldwide. And Skysong Innovations has secured nearly 1,600 U.S. patents and closed more than 1,450 option or license deals with commercial partners during its years of service to ASU. The organization has facilitated more than 230 ASU startups that have collectively attracted more than $1.3 billion in external funding and generated more than $2 billion in economic impact in Arizona since 2003.

Skysong is just one example of the new entrepreneurial culture at ASU. Access to entrepreneurship has become embedded at every stage of a student’s academic life span, from annual student competitions to the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute initiatives to fostering ASU spinouts.

ASU now has eight “Innovation Zones” across the Phoenix metro area and, just like urban neighborhoods, each Innovation Zone has its own distinct personality, characteristics and amenities. Some are biomedical in focus, while others commit to manufacturing R&D and the next generation of computer chips. At ASU, scientists can innovate in all sorts of creative environments, from basements and garages to grand, state-of the-art research facilities, suburban research parks to revitalized city cores.

“The true mixed development was definitely what we set our sights on, so it would be possible for people to live there, work and enjoy themselves in their spare time,” said ASU’s Morgan Olsen, executive vice president, treasurer and chief financial officer. “There’s a certain, we think, synergy to it all.”

ASU designed these Innovation Zones to ensure it can offer tenants a wide range of customizable options appropriate to size, industry and need. The side effect? ASU’s talent, together with the community and industry partners, can innovate from anywhere, at any time.  

There’s another key ingredient in approaching the $1 billion level. With a research “Field of Dreams,” top talent is coming to ASU as never before.

As of 2024, ASU’s buildings and online community have been filled with more than 5,000 innovative scholars, including five Nobel laureates, 12 MacArthur Fellows, 11 Pulitzer Prize winners, 11 National Academy of Engineering members, 26 National Academy of Sciences members, 28 American Academy of Arts and Sciences members, 41 Guggenheim fellows, 163 National Endowment for the Humanities fellows and 289 Fulbright Program American Scholars.

This recruitment of top talent has many benefits. For the 10th year in a row, ASU was ranked No. 1 in innovation in the annual “Best Colleges” 2025 rankings by U.S. News & World Report.

ASU has placed first in the peer-nominated category every year since the “most innovative” category was created.

“Receiving the top innovation ranking from our peers for a decade is significant, as it affirms that our enterprise-wide innovation mindset is deeply tied to our institutional identity,” Crow said.

Also with that talent influx, ASU scientists can compete for a larger slice of the federal research pie from agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

ASU’s enormous success as a top national research institution contributes directly and indirectly to the economic health of Arizona. Research expenditures are funds spent to conduct research, most often from grant-providing sources outside the university.

The National Science Foundation’s latest FY 2022–23 Higher Education Research and Development, or HERD, data show that ASU’s $904 million in research expenditures for that fiscal year place it among the top 2% of institutions without a medical school — ahead of Princeton University, the California Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University. The total also places ASU among the top 4% of all research universities, ahead of the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Purdue University and the University of Colorado-Boulder.

The 34% growth rate during the past two fiscal years is among the largest involving the top 50 research universities in the country.

Research dollars are spent both inside and outside Arizona, and the economic benefits of research aren’t just in those initial expenditures. There’s a “multiplier effect” taking place: Research creates additional development for the cities, county and state that a university is in, which would not happen otherwise.

Simply put, investment often attracts more investment, according to Sally Morton, executive vice president of ASU Knowledge Enterprise, the research arm of the university.

“We are at the forefront of groundbreaking research and innovation,” Morton said. “We are bridging the gap between research and entrepreneurship, and as we reach $1 billion in research expenditures, that translates into job creation and growth for Arizona.”

And the best may still be yet to come for ASU research. Coming soon are a brand-new engineering-focused medical school in downtown Phoenix and expanded industry partnerships that promise to usher in a new era of biomedical research for university faculty to further propel ASU research into the 21st century.

ASU Health, once at scale, will likely secure hundreds of millions of additional biomedical research funds — and make a difference in the health and lives of Arizonans.

“We are focusing our full energy and innovation on improving Arizona’s health outcomes,” Crow said. “We have an opportunity for change. And over the past 20 years, ASU has shown that we know how to create transformative change, at scale.” 

With contributions from various ASU news writers.