DENVER — Research at the University of Denver is on a notably steep trajectory. In the last decade, the amount of external funding has tripled.
“In [fiscal year] 2024, we exceeded $53 million in expenditures from outside the university,” said Corinne Lengsfeld, Ph.D., DU’s senior vice provost for research and graduate education. “Considering 10 years ago, we were at about $18 million, it’s a pretty significant increase for the campus over the last decade.”
About 300 of DU’s faculty members are currently working on research with external funding, “which is pretty big when you think there’s only 800 total faculty,” Lengsfeld said. “That doesn’t include people who might be doing unfunded work, like musicians and artists, so it’s a little bit skewed, but it’s a pretty nice critical mass, the number of faculty who are very active researchers through external funding.”
With such stellar metrics, perhaps it’s no surprise that DU rose into the upper echelon of research rankings from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a Very High Research University (or R1) in 2021.
“To be honest, that was a little bit of a surprise to us,” Lengsfeld said. “It was an ambition, but we didn’t necessarily think it was going to happen in ’21. I think now we’re at the volume and the productivity and that’s definitely who we are, but I think we were just a little bit surprised at the early reclassification for us in 2021.”
The university’s recent research boom represents the culmination of a decades-long comeback. After World War II, DU’s research relied largely on funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and was centered on astronomy and physics.
A university-owned observatory atop Mount Blue Sky was a big draw in the first half of the 20th century. “Back in the ’30s and ’40s, people would flock to come to that research station, because you could measure some of the things related to Einstein’s theory of relativity,” Lengsfeld said. “Before we got these particle accelerators, you could do some of this research up at very high altitude.”

The closure of DU’s College of Engineering in 1973, however, ended much of the work. “The university dropped off the map from the funding world,” said Lengsfeld, who joined DU in 2013.
While engineering is again part of the curriculum today, other research areas emerged in the 1970s and beyond, including biomechanics, robotics, neurodegenerative science, international relations, and early childhood mental health and wellbeing as areas of strength.
Coping with trauma is a huge component of the research involving childhood and family mental health. “How do you roll that back from a psychological standpoint, and how do you support children well through adolescence who may be in very challenging circumstances?” Lengsfeld said. “About 40% of all our faculty are doing research work in that area.”
Biomechanics researchers at DU have also had a big impact on knee and hip replacements over the last 25 years. “Their work has been largely with the companies that produce the implants and with the surgeons that implant it, and their ability to increase the lifetime and decrease the wear so that people can have these in their body for 40 years and not need a replacement has truly transformed who gets and how you get a joint replacement.”
More than 50 centers and institutes serve as the university’s research hubs in a wide range of areas, including unmanned systems, molecular diagnostics and conflict resolution. The Stress, Early Experience & Development (SEED) Research Center is one example. About 40 faculty members and graduate students are involved with the center at any given time, along with 10 to 15 undergraduates.
“It is actually pretty unique the way that we’ve got it built,” said Sarah Watamura, Ph.D., the center’s co-director and chair of DU’s Department of Psychology. “There are a few other places that have smaller groups of folks kind of doing the same thing, but not the not the breadth that we have.”
The SEED Research Center “has been a very effective recruitment tool to bring faculty here, and then also students, graduate students,” she added. “We do an enormous amount of collaborating, so it’s been very effective in terms of fostering a vibrant intellectual community.”
Watamura highlighted ongoing research related to depression during pregnancy and its long-term effects. “The Care Project, which is a collaboration with Denver Health, provides an intervention for depression for pregnant persons, and they have already demonstrated a very strong positive impact on reducing depression in those folks who are pregnant.”
The Care Project reflects a common thread connecting all of the research at DU. “We have a very deep focus on the public good,” Watamura said. “There’s a pretty big emphasis on how much money you bring in, how many publications you have, that kind of impact. And while everybody will say that public good is great, it’s not in the fabric in the way that it is at DU where it’s just part of what we do. It’s an expectation that the work has value.”
Lengsfeld described a virtuous cycle of research boosting education and driving recruitment, in turn catalyzing more research. “It’s all about the students,” she explained. “They’re getting an opportunity to see actual thought leaders, and sit right next to them as they tackle today’s toughest problems. They get to see how people have to pivot. They get to see how things aren’t easy. They get to see how there are trade-offs. They get a learning experience that’s unparalleled, that you couldn’t create in a classroom.”
About a third of outside funding for research at DU supports students in the form of stipends or tuition assistance. “There’s not a philanthropy that could possibly give that many scholarships every year,” Lengsfeld said. “And it’s not an endowment, it’s new money every year that runs into the school. I see that as the greatest pathway to access that there is. . . . For very little additional money, you get to give people access to a high-value college experience, and you get this rich learning environment that’s almost impossible to duplicate in any other way. It’s just fantastic, and it’s why I am in the role that I am.”
Lengsfeld said that the rise of research at DU has resulted from an intentional but organic cultural shift. “Every chancellor since 2004 has bought into this, and it hasn’t been forced upon the faculty,” she said. “I think that there’s a lot of universities that have an ambition to hit this R1 status, and they put a lot of money into it, and they go gangbusters, but it’s a bit top-down. I think the transformation that we’ve had since 2004 has really been faculty-led, and it’s transformed the whole campus. Now, it’s everywhere. It’s in every department, every major.”
She added, “I think we just unleashed the potential that was growing and made it possible for everybody to do it. And I think now it’s a culture on campus. We have critical mass, and I don’t think it’ll stop growing anytime soon.”
