Less than a year since the University of Texas at San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio became one institution — UT San Antonio — the university ranked among the top 2.3% of U.S. institutions to receive National Institutes of Health funding.
Despite receiving nearly $6 million less in NIH funding in 2025 than UTSA and UT Health received in 2024 separately, UT San Antonio managed to move up in the national rankings.
The overall NIH funding awarded to UT San Antonio in 2025 totaled $147,098,904.
“UT San Antonio’s improved ranking in 2025 reflects the continued strength and growing recognition of its research enterprise,” said Jennifer Sharpe Potter, UT San Antonio’s senior executive vice president for research and innovation. “This includes highly specialized and mission-driven work in fields that are critically important to the health needs of our region, Texas and the nation”
On Sept. 1, 2025, when the merger became official, UT San Antonio became the third largest public research university in Texas.
The long-awaited merger promised to better-position the university as a stronger candidate for research dollars, but under the Trump Administration the availability of federal research grants and funds changed quickly, and thousands of dollars in research funds were frozen or terminated.
The NIH’s 2025 funding decision placed the university at No. 64 among the 2,702 institutions ranked by the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research in its first appearance as a merged institution.
When UTSA and UT Health were ranked independently last year, UT Health led the way, ranking No. 69 nationally with $139,286,059 in NIH funding, while UTSA ranked No. 275 with $13,579,839.
The Blue Ridge Institute is an independent nonprofit organization that uses NIH funding for its annual rankings.
Dr. Francisco Cigarroa, UT San Antonio’s senior executive vice president for health affairs and health system, called the ranking a landmark moment for the newly merged institution and a sign of its faculty’s strength.
According to the institute, last year the NIH reported an increase in total dollar disbursements to U.S. medical schools, but these funds went to fewer institutions and fewer principal investigators, or PIs, who are the individuals named in the awards. When compared to 2024, the total number of awards to medical schools declined by 7.5% and these went to 4.2% fewer PIs.
“Schools of Public Health fared worse, with total 2025 NIH support declining 4.8% and the number of funded PIs down by 5.8% in comparison to 2024,” the Blue Ridge website states.
The combined total NIH funding received by the then-independent institutions was $152,865,898.
This year the NIH awarded nearly $1 million less to the Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine, though it still netted more than $124 million. The Kate Marmion School of Public Health also saw about $500,000 less in NIH funding, but netted $6,726,764. The two schools were previously ranked as part of UT Health San Antonio.
The School of Dentistry, which placed among the top 10 dental schools in the country with $9,770,084 in 2025, saw an increase of more than $3 million in NIH funding. Public Health research — outside the School of Public Health — was also awarded about $1 million more in 2025.
“The improved national ranking signals that UT San Antonio is strengthening its position among leading research institutions, even within a highly competitive and evolving federal funding environment,” Potter said.
The San Antonio Report interviewed Potter about navigating a merger, encouraging research and innovation, and the new doors that this merger might open.
Potter joined UT Health San Antonio in 2008 from Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital. Today she is tasked with overseeing the research funding for the institution, which for at least for this first year has two independent Carnegie R1 research classifications, the highest designation awarded to institutions that meet $50 million in total research spending and award 70 research doctorates annually.
Her answers were edited for clarity and length.
Please bring us up to date on how the institutions have navigated this merger and what this transformation means in terms of research?
Leading up to Sept. 1, 2025, one of the things I often said across the campuses was that it was about balancing stability with opportunity. And the reason why we were saying that was because we were in this strange situation, kind of unprecedented, that a university merged and is a double Carnegie R1.
And so the most important thing was that we didn’t want to do anything that would impede that pace, we wanted to be able to maintain the robust research programs of both universities. And as you know, this merger happened in a very complex year from a federal funding perspective, which added to the complexity of the merger. And so it turns out we actually navigated through the changes in the federal funding landscape rather well, better than many other universities for a lot of different reasons, but that stability piece was really important.
Having said that, a merger isn’t anything if it’s not an opportunity. And so that was this balance about what opportunities we are going to have together. We were going to create intentional opportunities to demonstrate to our faculty what we could do together.
Can you give some examples of the opportunities that have opened since the merger took place?
A great example of that is our health research challenge. Within the first six months, we funded $600,000 in new pilot projects seed funding to inspire our scientists to collaborate. It’s one thing to say, “We’ve got an engineering college here and a medical school on another campus, get together and do something.” You have to sort of energize that and do intentional activities, and the way that we did that was that we convened individuals together. We had about 300 people come in person at once and they were talking about what they were doing, networking and creating opportunities.
The theme was “where method meets need,” and it was around this idea that we have new methods, in Artificial Intelligence and discovery at the legacy UT San Antonio, and we have Alzheimer’s, the science of aging, mental health challenges, and all of these diseases and health topics at UT Health. So what can we do together?
Out of that initial convening we had about 72 research applications and we funded about 15 of them. So that $600,000 was intentionally invested out of our office of research and innovation for that.
Are there any areas of research that had gone untapped that are now developing due to the merger?
Yes, several, and they are far-ranging. Another piece of this is recognizing that while we are unique in tech access, because we are the third largest public research university in Texas and the largest with a comprehensive health science center, we play with many people across the United States, universities that all of us know. And what differentiates us from other large flagship universities in Texas is the fact that we have such a robust health mission.
So, one example of the types of applications we got was faculty from the College of Liberal and Fine Arts applying in partnership with faculty from the department of medicine.
That’s not a typical partnership. But when you see an application about the therapeutic value of the arts on diseases like Alzheimer’s, impacting mental health, that is a great example of why we need people to see themselves as experts in their field of choice, but also ask questions that relate to the human condition and health.
Others that are more typical are: the college of engineering and the school of medicine have a joint biomedical engineering program, so that students come through, they can get their doctorate and work on both campuses.
What we also wanted to hear is what are the projects in which engineers could help us address questions, maybe help us address musculoskeletal questions to improve orthopedic health. How can scientists rooted in AI and AI methods partner with medical chemists to increase and accelerate drug discovery?
But this doesn’t occur in a vacuum, this happens by taking advantage of the unique partnerships that we already had before the merger. What we got now is a little more accelerated process and an incentive to partner together.
So where is UT San Antonio now in this process of coming together as one major research institution?
One of the most important things to remember is that for our scientists, innovators, engineers, anyone in this discovery mission, this is very hard work. I think of these sometimes as 24/7 jobs because you are always relying on yourself.
So it’s our responsibility as an organization to work as quickly as possible to remove barriers. So for us to be able to attract and maintain the very best talent in San Antonio, the people who are going to grow our region, contribute to our economic growth, and the health of our population, we have to honor the importance of giving a very high level of service.
So this first year it’s been about us making sure that the people who are in the front lines of innovation have the tools and resources they need to make their lives simpler and so that they can do that work.
We also made an intentional decision that if we were going to fully capitalize on the opportunity before us and really bring to San Antonio and South Texas the very best university we can be for our community. We needed to unify our mission. And so the leadership team integrated and we are starting to bring the systems online.
The other piece is culture. So bringing together and defining what our innovation environment is, what our scientists believe, what our scholars and in the arts care about, and how can create a common mission that aligns with our overall vision.
How do these first rankings as one institution impact that mission and that vision?
We will always be focused on making sure that our reputational accomplishments are recognized. We have to have a reputational lift. We want to make sure that access continues. But the culture piece is also recognizing that people drive that, and that’s our students, our faculty, our staff at the university.
So we drive and monitor how we are performing nationally so that we can bring the very best product to the region.
It’s important for us to have a sustainable research enterprise and a culture of grantsmanship that we are looking to be able to grow.
The federal government continues to be one of the largest sponsors of research and discovery in the United States. So it’s important for us to be as ambitious as we can be related to that.
There’s a lot of different ways that universities can grow and expand while also maintaining access. One of the things that we’ve made an intentional decision around is that we’re going to continue to prioritize what matters to our region. That we are deeply engaged in hearing what the community thinks is important.
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
