About 2,000 monkeys at a Harvard Medical School research center will be moved to other laboratories around the country as the school shuts down the troubled center, an official with the National Institutes of Health said Wednesday.

The school announced Tuesday that it would close the facility, the New England Primate Research Center in Southborough, Mass., over the next two years. Harvard said financial uncertainties were behind the move, but the laboratory has been cited in recent years by the federal Department of Agriculture for failing to comply with the Animal Welfare Act, and four primates have died there since mid-2010.

The center, which has operated for nearly half a century and has contributed to research on AIDS and other diseases, employs about 200 people, including research faculty and support staff. It is one of eight national primate research centers that, in all, received about $87 million from the National Institutes of Health last year.

The N.I.H. official, Dr. James Anderson, a deputy director, said there were currently about 130 research projects at the Southborough center. N.I.H. officials, along with representatives from Harvard and the other national research centers, will review them case by case, he said. “They all work closely together; they know each other’s inventory,” Dr. Anderson said. “We’ll go through when and where to move the animals and projects.”