R&D Management

Under the leadership of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services has endured the departure of top officials at the CDC, FDA and NIH as well as significant staff reductions across the agency. This could erode American science as scientists look to move abroad. More than 75% of scientists who…

The National Science Foundation is channeling $1.5 billion over the next decade into independent research teams. Focus areas include quantum systems and next-generation scientific instruments. The news comes even as the agency navigates proposed budget cuts that would slash its funding by more than half and a grant pipeline that has slowed dramatically under the…

More R&D-heavy companies are going into debt. SpaceX? Racked up $23 billion in debt in 2025. Its xAI subsidiary, itself funded through loans, stands to repay $17.5 billion in debt. Microsoft? While it has retained its “AAA” credit rating, its stock has tumbled 12% year to date, partly over spending concerns. The company, which is…

AI is being commoditized in front of our eyes. Months after a frontier release, rivals, often including open source variants, either match it in terms of benchmarks, or come close. Meanwhile, every R&D and IP team now has access to the same enterprise Copilot license, the same Claude and ChatGPT seats, the same general-purpose models…

The pharmaceutical industry operates in a universe where the inverse of Moore’s Law holds true. In a seminal 2012 paper, investment analyst and researcher Jack Scannell coined the term “Eroom’s Law” to explain the reality that drug development tends to get dramatically more expensive over long stretches of time. While Eroom’s Law is not usually…

The White House just proposed what the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calls the largest year-over-year defense spending increase likely since World War II: $1.5 trillion in total budgetary resources, a $445 billion (42%) increase from FY2026. Of that, $350 billion would bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold entirely, routed through budget reconciliation as mandatory…

As research grows more interdisciplinary, the environments built to support it don’t always keep up. Forward-thinking universities are rethinking laboratories not just as technical spaces but as places that shape how scientists interact, focus, and work together. At the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, new facilities are testing that idea, designing around…

AI systems are playing an active role in designing experiments, screening millions of compounds and apparently generating novel mathematical proofs. Meanwhile, U.S. patent law still requires a human inventor, which precludes the potential of a solely AI inventor. The gap between those two realities is creating uncertainty for R&D organizations filing IP based on AI-assisted…

When a new homeowner in Southwest Michigan posted a photo of a vintage can of ethyl ether found in their basement to a large online chemistry forum on Reddit, the poster was just looking for cheap disposal advice. What they got instead was a chorus of terrified chemists and former hazardous waste technicians telling them…

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, has selected 31 Ph.D. candidates and postdoctoral scholars for its 2026 Future Leaders program, drawn from a competitive global applicant pool numbering in the hundreds. The cohort represents institutions across more than a dozen countries, including MIT, Caltech, Stanford, ETH Zürich, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and…

By all accounts, December 29, 2008 was an unremarkable day at UCLA’s Molecular Sciences Building. Campus was mostly deserted for winter break. A few postdocs were catching up on benchwork. In a fourth-floor chemistry lab, 23-year-old research assistant Sheri Sangji drew tert-butyllithium, a chemical that ignites on contact with air, into a plastic syringe. The…

Thomas Lograsso, director of the Critical Materials Innovation Hub at Ames National Laboratory, accepted the 2025 R&D Leader of the Year award with a speech that emphasized collaboration and investing in the next generation. “Science thrives on openness and collaboration,” Lograsso said. “We must continue to invest in research, share knowledge freely, and empower the…

STEM and healthcare degrees claim 10 of the top 20 positions in a new employment ranking of 74 college majors with mathematical sciences projected to grow 28.4% through 2033, the fastest rate of any occupational category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nursing ranked first overall with a 1.42% unemployment rate, followed by mathematics,…

The long-delayed September jobs report landed today with a headline that White House officials were eager to amplify. The economy added 119,000 jobs in September, more than double analysts’ expectations of roughly 50,000. Yet unemployment ticked up to 4.4%, the highest since 2021, and earlier months were revised down, with August now showing a loss…

Banks and credit card companies are outpacing tech giants in patent portfolio growth, with JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, and Bank of America each adding more than 1,200 active patent families as they race to lock down IP around machine learning, payments infrastructure, and fraud detection. Those are findings from data from IFI Claims. In IFI…

Asia’s patent offices carry the volume while Western megacaps in software, chips and medtech do most of the heavy filing. Drug majors are riding older IP waves instead of driving the boom. According to fresh WIPO data, innovators filed a record 3.7 million patent applications in 2024, up 4.9% from 2023 and the fastest growth…

Elsevier’s “Researcher of the Future Report,” published earlier this month, reveals that while 58% of researchers use AI tools for work, 45% feel undertrained in AI. Even so, researchers identify the benefits of AI, with 58% of researchers saying it saves them time. 68% of researchers say the pressure to publish is greater than it was…

[Image from Adobe Stock] Why you should read this report: Lab automation looks hot, but the usual indicators are quiet: patents are flat, vendors report uneven demand, and standard market metrics barely move. This report shows what those signals miss—where recent AI-drug-discovery capital actually landed, why “Lab Automation Engineer” roles increasingly require Python and APIs…

Asked whether AI will lessen the need for researchers, Google’s head of Research Yossi Matias gave a clear answer. “The only scenario where you would need fewer researchers is if we assume we’ve answered almost all the major questions. I don’t think anyone believes that,” he said at Google’s flagship research conference in Mountain View.…

After months of agency layoffs and program cuts, Washington still ended FY2025 with a $1.8 trillion deficit, essentially unchanged from last year, CBO estimates, while the shutdown idled large parts of the federal science enterprise. Across DOE labs, operations are continuing for now on prior-year funds, with limited visibility beyond the near term. Sandia told…

Visit nsf.gov this week and you’ll see a tan warning banner: ‘Due to a lapse in appropriations, NSF is closed.’ It’s five months past the agency’s 75th birthday: Harry Truman signed the National Science Foundation into law aboard his presidential train in Pocatello, Idaho on May 10, 1950. Now, roughly three-quarters of its staff are…

Engineering.com has opened nominations for its 2026 Top Workplaces for Engineers awards. Companies with at least 35 engineers or engineering staff comprising 10% of their workforce are eligible. The awards recognize organizations that create supportive and innovative cultures for engineering professionals, based on confidential employee feedback. Nominations are open through mid-January 2026, with winners to…

When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s (TCJA’s) R&D capitalization rules took effect in 2022, one of the biggest concerns for R&D-intensive companies was that the Section 174 R&D capitalization requirements would stifle innovation. The Trump Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed in July, brings significant relief for U.S. companies conducting R&D domestically…

The official 2025 R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World. This worldwide science and innovation competition, now in its 63rd year, received entries from organizations around the world. This year’s judging panel included industry professionals from across the globe who evaluated breakthrough innovations in technology and science. The Winners are listed below by…