Currently 8 active fellowships open to applicants in Worldwide, across AI, arts, film, journalism, research, tech and cross-disciplinary practice. Hand-curated and updated weekly. Almost every entry is funded; a few notable unpaid open calls and festival submissions are included as clearly flagged exceptions. Browse the list below, or use the interactive desk for filtering and shortlisting.
Subscribe: RSS feed · Calendar (.ics)
Short-term international research fellowship for scientists seeking placements at host institutions in participating member countries. Fellowships last 6 to 26 weeks and support international scientific collaboration, research mobility, knowledge exchange and cross-border partnerships. PRIORITY THEMES: sustainable agricultural productivity, climate action, environmental protection, biodiversity conservation, soil health, water resource sustainability, knowledge innovation, sustainable livestock systems, fisheries development and aquaculture sustainability. FUNDING: a travel lump sum, return economy airfare, a weekly subsistence allowance (EUR 600 or EUR 650 by host-country cost of living) and a EUR 165 terminal allowance; insurance, visa fees, lab/bench fees and family or personal costs are not covered. ELIGIBILITY: employed by or affiliated with an institution in a participating country; proposed host institution in a different participating country; at least 4 years of postdoctoral experience (exceptional candidates with equivalent expertise and a strong publication record may also be considered). Applicants must not already hold a position at the host institution, need employer approval and assurance of continued employment or affiliation after the fellowship, and previous fellows may reapply only after a 5-year gap. Applicants confirm country eligibility, secure a host institution and collaboration, prepare a research proposal (objective, scientific relevance, methodology, expected outcomes, 6-26 week timeline, collaboration benefits) and submit supporting documents (CV, publication list, employer approval, host acceptance letter, proof of affiliation).
This is Gender, the photography and visual culture platform run by Global 50/50, is launching its inaugural Regional Curatorial Fellows Programme for early-career curators and cultural practitioners working across photography, visual culture and gender justice. The premise: images shape how gender, power and social realities are understood, feeding public debate, cultural memory, research, advocacy and policy, yet the communities and visual practices that should inform those narratives stay underrepresented in the institutions that circulate them. The programme's argument is that diversifying who makes images is not enough, and that it also matters who selects, contextualises, writes about, commissions and circulates them. For the first time, This is Gender is embedding regional curators directly inside its global photography competition, which has run six cycles and receives thousands of submissions a year. WHAT THE FELLOWSHIP INVOLVES: working inside the competition and seeing first-hand how a major platform discovers, reviews and champions new work; shaping curatorial decisions by bringing regional knowledge and cultural insight into the selection and interpretation of work; contributing to public-facing projects including exhibitions, editorial outputs and digital storytelling while developing your own writing, framing and curatorial voice; direct engagement with international judges, curators, artists, editors and cultural practitioners; and building a network across an international cohort of peers. WHO SHOULD APPLY: curators, critics, writers, researchers, artistic directors, photographers, organisers and cultural practitioners from global majority countries and historically underrepresented communities. Early-career practitioners and recent graduates are strongly encouraged, and a formal curatorial title is not required. HOW TO APPLY: read the full role description and FAQs on the fellowship page and submit the online application form; the organisers offer the application in alternative formats and are open to a conversation before applying. Applications close 22 September 2026.
Tech Policy Press is recruiting its 2027 fellowship cohort to pursue independent reporting and analysis on urgent questions at the intersection of technology and democracy. Since 2023 the programme has supported 25 fellows from 11 countries across three cohorts, writing on AI governance, tech regulation, digital rights and the entanglement of state and corporate power. WHO IT IS FOR: mid-career journalists, researchers, lawyers and public policy professionals with a strong background in a specific tech policy area, a particular geography, or technology's impact on democracy and society. Applicants from the Global Majority and from communities underrepresented in media are encouraged, as are projects that centre communities and regions usually excluded from global tech policy conversations. Contributions can range from original reporting to policy analysis, and technical practitioners are welcome as long as the work fits the publication's editorial purview. EXPECTATIONS: at least one piece of analysis or reporting per month (exclusive to Tech Policy Press, though it may be republished elsewhere), a mandatory hour-long monthly cohort meeting, a monthly check-in with the editorial team, collaboration with other fellows and the masthead, agreed deadlines, and disclosure of conflicts of interest. Applicants should arrive with a clear area of focus and a sense of how the work will inform both the public and decision-makers. APPLY via the online form by 11:59pm EDT on 24 September 2026, with a CV or resume, a cover letter of no more than two pages, links to prior publications (open access, published within the past three years, at least one in English and at least one solo-authored; social posts, pre-prints and unpublished coursework do not count) and two professional references. Shortlisted candidates may be invited to an online interview. Decisions are expected by early December 2026. Two optional Zoom information sessions run on 9 September at 8am EDT and 16 September at 7pm EDT; registration required.
The Wilson Center, the congressionally chartered nonpartisan policy research institution in Washington DC, awards 10 to 20 research fellowships for its 2027-2028 class. Fellows conduct research and write in their areas of interest while interacting with policymakers in Washington and with other fellows. The Center accepts policy-relevant, nonpartisan proposals that address key foreign policy challenges confronting the United States and the world, and projects must align with at least one of the Center's four scholarship pillars: strategic competition, economic statecraft, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION, and regional scholarship. The technology and innovation pillar is the relevant route for AI governance, emerging technology and digital policy projects, which the Center also supports through its Science and Technology Innovation Program. Fellows work remotely for the duration of the fellowship; the Center covers travel costs for two required trips to Washington DC at the beginning and the conclusion of the term. The stipend is USD 10,000 per month for the twelve-month term, which runs 1 June 2027 to 30 May 2028. ELIGIBILITY: academic candidates need a PhD in hand and either a published book or monograph beyond the dissertation, or a substantial body of research articles (five or more) in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Non-academic applicants (practitioners, journalists, public intellectuals) need at least ten years of relevant experience and a record of substantial policy impact. There is no citizenship restriction, but English proficiency is required. Applications, including letters of recommendation, must be submitted online via Interfolio by 11:59pm ET on 30 September 2026. Questions: fellowships@wilsoncenter.org. NOTE: this is an open-topic foreign policy fellowship, not an AI-specific one; the technology angle depends on how you scope the proposal.
Fellowships supporting enterprise and investigative reporting with a business or economic angle, from the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Center for Business Journalism at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY. Tech-platform economies, AI labour, data-broker investigations, digital-economy beats and similar tech-and-business stories fit naturally. ELIGIBILITY: working journalists with at least 5 years of professional experience; freelancers and staff are both eligible worldwide. CYCLES: Fall 2026 cycle deadline 12 October 2026; spring cycle expected around April 2027. No application fee.
Robot foundation models (pi-zero, OpenVLA, GR00T and others) are approaching widespread deployment on the back of more than USD 18 billion in funding, and almost nobody is working on their safety. The Physical AI Safety Institute, a new nonprofit founded by Bear Haon and Kaylene Stocking and seeded by a grant from BlueDot Impact, describes itself as a capacity-building organisation growing the community that develops techniques to interpret, align and control robot foundation models. Its research fellowship runs in 12-week cohorts: each fellow works within a stream led by a mentor on a concrete problem in physical AI safety, with mentors drawn from researchers with track records in robot foundation models, mechanistic interpretability, safe control or adversarial robustness for embodied systems. Each cohort ends with a research symposium where fellows present their work. STREAMS: mechanistic interpretability (sparse autoencoders and activation patching for VLA and WAM architectures); adversarial robustness (jailbreaking and prompt injection in the embodied action space); runtime monitoring (detecting when a policy operates outside its competence envelope); sim-to-real safety transfer (do safety behaviours survive deployment on physical hardware); and robot security (cyberattack vectors, data poisoning and supply chain for deployed robot models). WHO SHOULD APPLY: researchers with strong technical foundations in robotics or machine learning and a demonstrated interest in safety; prior safety experience is not required. PROCESS: this stage is an expression of interest, not a full application. The form takes about two minutes and asks you to pick your stream and preferred cohort dates; concrete details including stipend figures and application deadlines are shared through that channel, and neither is published on the site as of listing. PAISI also publishes seven free curriculum modules running from classical robot safety through VLA interpretability, adversarial robustness and runtime monitoring to deployment evaluation, plus a white paper, The Case for Physical AI Safety, at paisi.ai/the-case-for-physical-ai-safety. Contact: bear@paisi.ai.
AIXI Labs is a small London-based non-profit doing AI safety research grounded in algorithmic information theory. Its stated position is that most AI research today is either mathematically clean but narrow, or practical but too opaque for rigorous safety analysis; the lab targets a third category, methods general enough to describe powerful agents and provable enough to support real safety claims, using AIXI (the theoretical model of unbounded artificial superintelligence) and then porting the strongest of those ideas to modern LLM-based agents. The fellowship is a quarterly, rolling programme for researchers who want to work on this agenda under close mentorship from the core team: Cole Wyeth (Founder and Executive Director), Marcus Hutter (Research Director) and Aram Ebtekar (Founding Research Scientist). Fellows pursue a focused research project over roughly a quarter and receive a monthly stipend plus a compute budget for machine-learning work. The fellowship is fully remote, so fellows may work from anywhere in the world or from the London base. RESPONSIBILITIES: pursue a self-directed research project aligned with the lab's algorithmic-information-theoretic approach to AI safety, spanning anything from foundational theory to empirical tests with LLM-based agents; shape the project direction around your own strengths and interests, as the lab supports a range of work within this framework; and contribute papers, blog posts or other written output communicating results to the broader AI safety and ML research communities. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: a research background at the level of a current PhD student (for primarily empirical projects, a master's-level command of the relevant mathematics paired with substantial industry or applied research experience can also qualify); solid grounding in probability, statistics, information theory and reinforcement learning, sufficient to engage seriously with AIXI-style theoretical models (prior expertise in algorithmic information theory or AIXI is NOT required); strong verbal and written communication skills; genuine motivation to reduce existential risk from advanced AI and enthusiasm for the lab's kind of work. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: publications at top ML, AI or theory venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ALT or COLT, though the lab values the strength of your best work over volume; background in algorithmic information theory, computability theory, learning theory or related theoretical computer science; experience fine-tuning, evaluating or red-teaming LLM-based and/or RL agents; prior engagement with the UAI/AIXI community or related fields, including members of the lab's online reading groups. APPLICATIONS are reviewed on a rolling basis and previous applicants remain eligible for later rounds.
The ILIAD Intensive is a four-week, full-time, in-person program for mathematically strong researchers interested in foundational AI alignment, running in London (at LISA) and in Berkeley. It runs five days a week, 10am to 6pm, in cohorts of 15 to 30 participants. CURRICULUM, across five clusters: Alignment (decomposing the alignment problem, pretraining, post-training and deployment, reward learning); Learning (deep learning theory, singular learning theory, training dynamics); Abstractions, Representations and Interpretability (mechanistic interpretability, natural latents); Agency (reinforcement learning, decision theory, agent foundations); and Safety Guarantees (debate, steganography, the limits of interpretability). MONEY: no tuition is charged. Each participant receives a USD 5,000 travel and housing allowance, office space at the venue, and lunch and dinner five days a week. Participants book and pay for their own travel and accommodation out of the allowance. ELIGIBILITY: a strong mathematical background, typically graduate-level study or a completed degree in mathematics, physics or theoretical computer science, though mathematical maturity is weighted more heavily than specific credentials. Research experience, general competence and motivation are also assessed. Prior machine learning or alignment experience is not required. DEADLINE: no fixed closing date is published. A single application covers several upcoming programs and applicants indicate their preferred dates and locations; applications are being accepted for the October 2026 and November 2026 cohorts. HOW TO APPLY: through the application portal at iliad.ac/apply. Questions to contact@iliad.ac.