FEMA Awards Over $7 Million to Northeastern University for COVID-19 Testing Costs

BOSTON – The Federal Emergency Management Agency will be sending more than $7 million to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to reimburse Northeastern University for some of the costs of providing testing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The $7,008,017 Public Assistance grant will reimburse the private research university in Boston for the cost of having its staff provide 1,559,363 COVID tests to students, faculty and staff between June 2020 and September 2021.

The university opened and operated three COVID-19 test sites on the Northeastern University campus – Cabot Testing Center, Huntington Testing Center, and Life Sciences Testing Center – staffed using temporary unbudgeted employees, and reassigned permanent employees. Each test site was open seven days a week, 12 hours per day.

“FEMA is pleased to be able to assist Northeastern University with these costs,” said FEMA Region 1 Regional Administrator Lori Ehrlich. “Providing resources for our institutions of higher education to combat the COVID-19 pandemic is critical to their success, and to our success as a nation.”

FEMA’s Public Assistance program is an essential source of funding for states and communities recovering from a federally declared disaster or emergency.

So far, FEMA has provided more than $1.4 billion in Public