HFSP | 2027 Postdoctoral Fellowships
Event details
| Date | 05.05.2026 |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Aim: The HFSP fellowship program supports proposals for frontier, potentially transformative research in the life sciences. Applications for high-risk projects are particularly encouraged. The projects should be interdisciplinary in nature and should challenge existing paradigms by using novel approaches and techniques. Scientifically, they should address an important problem or a barrier to progress in the field.
HFSP postdoctoral fellowships encourage early career scientists to broaden their research skills by moving into new areas of study while working in a new country.
Two different fellowships are available:
Funding: Living allowance according to host country (see Guidelines), as well as a research and travel allowance.
Duration: 36 months
Eligibility: A summary of eligibility criteria is given below. For full details, please see the Guidelines.
How to Apply: Applications will follow a two-step submission process via the online submission platform ProposalCentral. First, applicants will be asked to initiate a Letter of Intent by 5 May 2026; full instructions for the LoI submission can be found here.
In a second step, successful applicants (~15-20%) will be invited to submit a Full Application. If invited, full proposals must be submitted by 24 September 2026. Please note that the signing official of the host institution must sign off on the full proposal submission on ProposalCentral; please leave plenty of time for this step. If EPFL will be your host institution, please contact the Research Office for any questions on the institutional signoff.
Deadline, LOI initiation: 5 May 2026
Further information
HFSP postdoctoral fellowships encourage early career scientists to broaden their research skills by moving into new areas of study while working in a new country.
Two different fellowships are available:
- Long-Term Fellowships (LTF) are for applicants with a PhD on a biological topic who want to embark on a novel and frontier project focusing on the life sciences.
- Cross-Disciplinary Fellowships (CDF) are for applicants who hold a doctoral degree from a non-biological discipline (e.g. physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering or computer sciences) and who have not worked in the life sciences before.
Funding: Living allowance according to host country (see Guidelines), as well as a research and travel allowance.
Duration: 36 months
Eligibility: A summary of eligibility criteria is given below. For full details, please see the Guidelines.
- Anyone from any country and any nationality can apply for a fellowship. However, candidates cannot apply for a fellowship to work in the country of their nationality, regardless of whether they have obtained their PhD degree in this or another country. Further, A candidate who is not a national of one of the HFSPO members (see page 5 of the Guidelines) may apply to work only in a research institution in one of the member countries. A candidate who is a national of one of the member countries can apply to work in a research institution in any country that they are not a national of.
- Applicants must propose to work in a country different from the one where they did their previous PhD work or first post-doctoral studies. For those institutions that are not classified as national, i.e. international or extraterritorial institutions such as EMBL, ICPT or ICGEB, the country in which the laboratory is located will be considered the host country. Candidates should not have spent more than 12 months in their proposed host institution at the activation date of the fellowship.
- A research doctorate (PhD) or a doctoral-level degree comparable to a PhD with equivalent experience in basic research (e.g. a research based MD or medical PhD) must be conferred by the start of the fellowship, but is not required at the time of submission. If PhD has already been awarded, The degree must have been conferred in the 3 years prior to the submission deadline
- Applicants must propose a research topic different to that of their PhD and previous postdoctoral work. The proposal must align with the mission and objectives of HFSP and the scientific scope of the HFSP Fellowship program.
- Applicants must have at least one full-length original research publication, in English, for which the applicant is a lead author (e.g. applicant is either the single author, first author, or joint-first author). By the submission deadline of the Letter of Intent, the manuscript should be either i) already published, (ii) accepted and in press, or (iii) accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, or (iv) available online in a recognized open-access (OA) preprint repository AND submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.
How to Apply: Applications will follow a two-step submission process via the online submission platform ProposalCentral. First, applicants will be asked to initiate a Letter of Intent by 5 May 2026; full instructions for the LoI submission can be found here.
In a second step, successful applicants (~15-20%) will be invited to submit a Full Application. If invited, full proposals must be submitted by 24 September 2026. Please note that the signing official of the host institution must sign off on the full proposal submission on ProposalCentral; please leave plenty of time for this step. If EPFL will be your host institution, please contact the Research Office for any questions on the institutional signoff.
Deadline, LOI initiation: 5 May 2026
Further information
- More information about the program is available here
- The application portal can be found here
- For any other questions, please contact the Research Office
Practical information
- General public
- Free