The Dharma Initiative, also written DHARMA (Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications), is a fictional research project featured in the television series Lost. It is introduced in the second season episode "Orientation". In 2008, the Dharma Initiative website was launched.

The Dharma Initiative and its origins are first explored in the episode "Orientation" by an orientation film in the Swan Station. Pierre Chang (François Chau), under the pseudonym of Dr. Marvin Candle, explains that the project began in 1970, created by two doctoral candidates from the University of Michigan, Gerald and Karen DeGroot (Michael Gilday and Courtney Lavigne), and was funded by Alvar Hanso (Ian Patrick Williams) of the Hanso Foundation.

They imagined a "large-scale communal research compound", where scientists and free thinkers from around the globe could research meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, electromagnetism, and a sixth discipline that the film begins to identify as "utopian social-" before being cut off. The episodes "LaFleur" and "He's Our You" indicate that mathematician Horace Goodspeed was in charge of Dharma Initiative operations on the Island. Key decisions that needed to be made on the Island were taken by a committee, which included all department heads, including Flame Station head Radzinski and security head LaFleur (the name Sawyer was assuming).

They evidently answer to a higher authority based in University of Michigan, as Radzinski threatens to call them to override a key decision by Goodspeed. In the episode "The Variable", Daniel Faraday confirmed that Dharma Initiative Headquarters, at least in the 1970's, was in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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