Kirill Larin, the Cullen Endowed Chair and a professor of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Cullen College of Engineering, is in the 93rd percentile of researchers when it comes to medical research, according to the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research.
Larin’s reported funding is $2.28 million for the federal fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2025. This puts him well above the average researcher at $862,293, and the median researcher at $507,000.
“I am honored by this recognition, but it really reflects the work of an outstanding team,” he said. “I am especially grateful to my research faculty, Dr. Salavat Aglyamov and Dr. Manmohan Singh, and most importantly to the students and postdoctoral fellows whose creativity, dedication and persistence have allowed us to build a strong multidisciplinary research program.”
The Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research was established in 2006. While it conducts research on protein kinase inhibitors, it is most known nationally for its yearly examinations of National Institutes of Health funding.
In total, this year’s report cataloged and tallied the funding for more than 42,000 researchers. The total funding tracked was $36.8 billion.
At Cullen, Larin heads the Biomedical Optics Laboratory. He leads several multidisciplinary research projects ranging from developmental biology to tissue biomechanics. Larin’s research activities are currently funded by five NIH R01 grants, and expenditures have surpassed $2 million annually for the past several years.
“Thanks to the efforts of our team and many exceptional collaborators, we have been able to develop a multidisciplinary research program in several independent directions, ranging from fundamental questions in developmental biology to clinically oriented translational research in disease diagnostics,” he said.
“I am deeply grateful to collaborators such as Drs. Nimesh Patel and Michael Twa at the UH College of Optometry, Richard Finnell and Irina Larina at Baylor College of Medicine, Shervin Assassi at UTHealth Science Center, Fabrice Manns at the University of Miami, and Giuliano Scarcelli at the University of Maryland, whose expertise has been essential to the success and breadth of our work.”
Larin was recognized as the University’s top research-producing faculty in 2022 and 2023, and he earned the 2025 SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award. He joined Cullen in 2004, and he became chairman of the Biomedical Engineering Department in 2024.