NIH Funding to Canadian Research, 1985–2025#
Below is a working dashboard, built end-to-end against a real dataset, as a demonstration of the principles laid out in mirador. It reads the same data the same way regardless of who opens it; it follows the site’s light and dark theme automatically; it tells a focused story rather than presenting a wall of charts.
The dataset is every NIH grant awarded to a Canadian institution between fiscal year 1985 and fiscal year 2025, pulled from NIH RePORTER. The headline finding: NIH funding to Canadian biomedical research peaked at $70 million in 2009 and has fallen 44% since.
$1.49B
Total funding awarded
Cumulative, 1985–2025
6,344
Total grants awarded
Includes renewals and supplements
120
Recipient institutions
Universities, hospitals, research centers
−44.4%
Decline from peak
Peak 2009 to 2025
NIH funding to Canada peaked at $70M in 2009 and has declined 44.4% since. Annual NIH funding awarded to Canadian institutions, with a 5-year centered moving average overlay.
UBC and Toronto received $280M combined. Top 15 recipient institutions, lifetime cumulative funding 1985–2025.
Every top recipient grew, but not on a straight line. Average annual funding for the top 9 recipient institutions across four decades. Each line is one institution; the trajectory between points shows what an endpoint-only view hides. Most peaked in 2005–2014; three (CAMH, Queen’s, Sick Children) kept climbing.
Different NIH institutes show different funding trajectories. Annual funding 1985–2025 from each of the eight largest NIH institutes funding Canadian research. Y-axes are independent: each chart’s vertical scale fits its own data so the shape is visible.
NCI · National Cancer Institute
$268M lifetime · peak 2011
NIAID · Allergy & Infectious Diseases
$195M lifetime · peak 2010
NIMH · Mental Health
$119M lifetime · peak 2021
NIDDK · Diabetes, Digestive & Kidney
$118M lifetime · peak 2009
NINDS · Neurological Disorders & Stroke
$111M lifetime · peak 2011
NIDA · Drug Abuse
$111M lifetime · peak 2017
NHLBI · Heart, Lung & Blood
$102M lifetime · peak 2008
NICHD · Child Health & Human Development
$58M lifetime · peak 2015
Source. NIH RePORTER, the National Institutes of Health’s public database of research grants. Filtered to Country: CANADA, all fiscal years. Extracted 1 May 2026.
What “Total Cost” includes. Each grant record’s Total Cost field reports the funded amount for that fiscal year, combining direct and indirect costs. Multi-year grants appear as multiple records, one per fiscal year of funding. Sums above are simple totals across records.
Caveats. Charts exclude FY2026, which was only partially complete at the extraction date. The “decline from peak” KPI compares peak (2009) to FY2025, the most recent complete year. Some grant records have blank Total Cost values and are counted as $0 in totals; these are typically administrative supplements or contracts rather than substantive awards.
Why this dataset. NIH funding to Canadian institutions is a clean, bounded subset of NIH RePORTER that tells a self-contained story: where U.S. federal biomedical research dollars flow into the Canadian research ecosystem, who receives them, and how the volume has changed over four decades.
How this dashboard was built. Charts are interactive Chart.js renders embedded via Blowfish’s native chart shortcode, with hover tooltips for exact values in the browser. The page itself is generated by a Python script that aggregates the raw NIH RePORTER export and emits the Chart.js configurations directly into the markdown source.
Accessibility. Every chart series passes WCAG 2.1 AA contrast in both light and dark themes, verified by tools/audit_contrast.py in the repo. Colors swap between themes via an inline JavaScript adapter that listens for theme toggle events; the slope chart uses Okabe-Ito and Paul Tol categorical palettes, chosen for color-blind distinguishability.