In this paper we define university research culture and suggest a metric to evaluate the level of its maturity by comparing five universities in Russia, including the regional ones. We argue that strong research culture is pivotal for talent attraction and quality education, especially in engineering. By comparing the research productivity of universities with established and with immature research cultures during COVID-19 pandemic, we demonstrate that the mature research culture has helped universities to survive such global stressful situations with comparatively fewer loses, whereas the universities with currently undeveloped or emerging research culture have experienced a dramatic impact on their publication output. We suggest a set of activities to enhance research capacity of HE organizations by engaging local full-time faculty and report the results of implementation of a related faculty development program at one of the regional universities under study in late 2019 – early 2020. The implementation results show that such an intervention has contributed to enhancing research capacity and has advanced research culture at the University even at the time of pandemic as the result of increased research productivity of experienced and moderately experienced researchers and of forming new research groups.