Chandani Hangilipola

Chandani Hangilipola serves as a key procurement professional within the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, where she manages complex research and laboratory support acquisitions aligned with NIDA’s mission to advance scientific understanding of substance use disorders. Her portfolio centers on securing specialized scientific equipment, biological manufacturing capabilities, and analytical testing services critical to translational neuroscience research. She oversees competitive procurements under FAR and HHS-specific guidelines, ensuring compliance with federal research funding mandates while facilitating timely access to cutting-edge technologies for grantees and contract research organizations. Hangilipola maintains strong, sustained relationships with leading academic medical institutions including The McLean Hospital Corporation, the University of Maryland Baltimore, the University of Miami, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. These partnerships typically involve multi-year research support contracts for preclinical and clinical drug abuse studies, requiring specialized instrumentation, biospecimen handling, and data analytics infrastructure. Her contracting approach emphasizes long-term scientific collaboration over transactional vendor relationships, fostering institutional trust and technical alignment with NIDA’s research priorities. Her procurement patterns reflect a clear preference for full and open competition, with 100% of awards issued under no set-aside classifications. This indicates a strategic focus on scientific merit and technical capability over socioeconomic preferences, prioritizing access to the highest-quality research infrastructure regardless of vendor size or certification status. Her primary NAICS focus areas include analytical laboratory instrument manufacturing (334516) and biological product manufacturing (325414), reflecting deep expertise in procuring high-precision neurobiological research tools, automated drug screening systems, and GMP-compliant biological reagents. She also routinely acquires medical device wholesale services (423450) and independent testing laboratory services (541380), demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of the end-to-end research supply chain supporting addiction science.