HFSP Postdoctoral Fellowship

About the HFSP Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Human Frontier Science Program funds postdoctoral fellowships for frontier, interdisciplinary research in the life sciences. It is unusual among postdoc fellowships in two ways: international mobility is a hard requirement rather than a bonus, and changing research direction is an explicit scoring criterion rather than a risk to be managed. There are two types. Long-Term Fellowships are for applicants with a PhD in a biological discipline, or who have already worked in the life sciences, and require the applicant to show that the proposed project is significantly different from their previous work. Cross-Disciplinary Fellowships are for applicants holding a doctoral degree from a non-biological discipline such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering or computer science, with no or little prior training in the life sciences, who bring that skill set to a fundamental biological problem. Both run for three years, are non-renewable, and may be held only once. The award covers a living allowance set per host country, a research and travel allowance, and situational child, parental leave and relocation allowances. HFSP uses a two-step submission: a Letter of Intent, of which roughly the top 15 to 20 percent of eligible submissions are invited to submit a full proposal, followed by external peer review and committee assessment. Reviewers score on a 1 to 10 scale in steps of 0.5, and scores of 7 and above are fundable. The top band, 9.0 to 10.0, is labelled Truly Frontier and rewards work that is highly novel, cutting-edge and possibly risky, and that would be paradigm shifting if it succeeded. Purely applied work is excluded, including clinical and pharmaceutical projects and method development that does not aim to answer a basic biological question.

Who is eligible?

• •PhD conferred no more than 3 years (36 months) before the full proposal deadline. The degree need not be complete at application, but must be completed before the stated cut-off
• •Applicants may be of any nationality, but cannot hold the fellowship in their country of nationality, nor in the country where they obtained their PhD
• •No more than 12 months cumulative study or work in the proposed host country by the time the fellowship activates
• •The proposed supervisor cannot be a former collaborator or research supervisor, cannot have co-published with the applicant, and cannot have hosted them for more than 12 months
• •Each host supervisor may endorse only ONE applicant per year
• •At least one lead-author publication (single, first or joint-first). A recognised open-access preprint also submitted to a journal is accepted at Letter of Intent stage only
• •One Letter of Intent per applicant per year, and an HFSP postdoctoral fellowship may be held only once in a career
• •The proposal must involve a change of country AND a change of research topic

How to apply

1. Secure a host supervisor who passes the independence rules

   They cannot be a former collaborator or supervisor, cannot have co-published with you, and may endorse only one applicant per year. Confirm all three before investing in the proposal.

2. Initiate and submit the Letter of Intent

   On ProposalCentral, with separate initiation and submission deadlines a week apart. One Letter of Intent per applicant per year, so there is no second attempt within a round.

3. Letter of Intent review

   Two review committee members score each Letter of Intent, with a third review triggered by significant divergence. Roughly the top 15 to 20 percent of eligible submissions advance.

4. Submit the full proposal, if invited

   Invited applicants only, several months after the Letter of Intent. At this stage only published, in-press or accepted papers count toward the publication requirement.

5. External peer review and committee assessment

   Two to three external evaluators plus the review committee produce a final ranking. Reviewers score on a 1 to 10 scale in 0.5 steps, and scores of 7 and above are fundable.

6. Award notification and activation

   Awards are announced around March, and the fellowship activates within a stated window beginning the following April. Fellows cannot hold other paid employment or another fellowship concurrently.

What sets winning proposals apart

• ✓Make the project yours, not the lab's. The published scoring guide explicitly penalises minor applicant contribution to proposal development, so reviewers are looking for evidence that you conceived it.
• ✓Do not propose the host lab's next logical experiment. Obvious next step for host laboratory is a named low-score trigger. Choose a project the host lab could not have written without you.
• ✓Take real risk. The top band accepts that frontier science can be risky, and a mainstream project is a named reason to score low. Safe and feasible is the wrong thing to optimise for here.
• ✓For Cross-Disciplinary, name both sides of the combination. Reviewers look for a clear combination of life-science and non-life-science approaches, so state what your non-biological training actually contributes.
• ✓For Long-Term, state the discontinuity from your PhD explicitly. Significantly different from previous work is the scored standard, and HFSP expects a change of country and topic, so spell out what is new in methods, study system or theory.

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