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Harvard Medical School has pulled in a raft of small-dollar donations and a major gift from billionaire Leonard V. Blavatnik, who froze contributions in 2023 amid outcry over campus antisemitism, as the school faces steep federal funding cuts, its dean announced on Thursday.
HMS has received gifts from 4,000 alumni and other donors, including 700 who gave for the first time after Harvard rejected far-reaching demands from the Trump administration in April, Dean George Q. Daley ’82 wrote in a message that was sent to school affiliates and posted on the HMS website.
Blavatnik committed $18.86 million to continue an awards program for translational therapeutics research and launch a new funding pool for early-career researchers. $5.75 million of those funds will be earmarked for junior faculty conducting basic research at the HMS Quad.
The billionaire — who gave HMS the single largest gift in its history in 2018 — ceased donations to Harvard in December 2023, citing Harvard’s response to antisemitism complaints and then-President Claudine Gay’s testimony at a fateful congressional hearing earlier that month. He released some funds back to Harvard this spring, CNN reported in April.
Blavatnik’s major new commitment is a sign that Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76’s efforts to convince donors that Harvard is committed to fighting antisemitism — and to rally support for its battle with Donald Trump — may be working.
And it comes at a time when Harvard is counting on private philanthropy more than ever. The federal government terminated approximately 350 research grants to HMS in mid-May, requiring many researchers to immediately halt work. In total, the Trump administration has slashed more than $2.7 billion from the University’s multiyear grant commitments.
In combination with a new 8 percent tax on endowment income, Harvard estimates that the funding cuts could cost $1 billion in a single year.
For HMS, which relies heavily on federal funding for expensive biomedical research, the costs could stretch well into the future. The Education Department disqualified Harvard from receiving new federal grants. And Trump’s proposed budget would cut $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard’s biggest federal funder.
Daley’s message also outlined how HMS is coping with its gloomy financial straits.
He wrote that more than $8 million of the donations HMS brought in last fiscal year will support M.D.-Ph.D. students, whose program lost federal funding this spring. Another $4.4 million was raised to support postdoctoral fellows next year.
HMS will also “continue to aggressively pursue philanthropy” and establish industry collaborations. Those will be modeled off the school’s $30 million research partnership with pharmaceutical giant AbbVie, launched in 2020 to support viral research during the Covid-19 pandemic, Daley wrote.
The Medical School is also restructuring its system for distributing funding internally in order to handle Trump’s cuts. Daley announced that HMS will replace approximately 50 percent of funding lost by basic research departments through internal redistribution, doled out as block grants. Departments will be able to reach an average of 74 percent prior funding levels through supplemental discretionary support, the message estimated.
The new funding structure was the brainchild of the Advisory Council on Research Sustainability, a task force of HMS faculty and administrators that was first convened in February. Daley has also been meeting frequently with the leaders of the Quad’s preclinical departments, he wrote.
But the new money HMS is bringing in is a fraction of what it has lost, and internal triage can only go so far. Daley’s message also discussed how the Medical School has pared back spending.
He reiterated that HMS’s hiring freeze — already prolonged until Sept. 1 — will continue, in line with Garber’s extension of the University-wide pause. School-funded travel and “numerous renovation projects and improvement requests” have been suspended, Daley added.
“We need to prevent our expenses from outpacing our revenues, which means the size and scope of our work will look different in the coming years,” he wrote.
He noted that HMS is still “getting more details from the University on the FY26 budget.”
The school told its employees to expect layoffs as far back as April.
Cost-cutting and funding reallocation have also taken place at the University level. Garber has allocated $250 million from Harvard’s central budget to support research affected by federal cuts over the next year. Meanwhile, budget guidance from Harvard’s central administration has already dictated new austerity measures at its schools.
Individual schools’ budget plans for fiscal year 2026, which will draw on central guidance, are expected over the next week.
Daley concluded his message with a call to action, urging HMS researchers to share the importance of their research through University-affiliated channels, including Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.
“Communicating the value of your work has never been more important,” Daley wrote.
“We are at our best when confronting challenge,” he added. “Harvard Medical School will endure.”
—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.
—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.
