Currently 18 active research and journalism grants, fellowships and residencies open to applicants in Worldwide. 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.
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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).
Normsy, a project of Civic Health Project, runs a small methods incubator for new strategies to measure or estimate the impact of prosocial social-media interventions. Normsy identifies toxic posts (typically content attacking or violating civic norms) and offers real users a set of AI-generated prosocial comments to choose from and post; the open question is how to estimate the effect of those comments on content producers, other commenters and bystanders who consume content without interacting measurably. The current approach combines survey experiments (how active X users respond emotionally to threads with and without the intervention, and how it shifts agreement with and support for the original post) with paid X API platform data (classifying comments before and after an intervention, plus coarse engagement metrics that cost money each time they are recollected). WHAT THEY WANT: a systematic way to leverage available platform data and maximise the utility of the survey experiments. Example proposals include a strategy for measuring toxicity/prosociality and reach/visibility of a thread over time with a randomisation design generating a control group of threads, or an approach to benchmarking the prosocial potential of AI-generated comments through an iterative arena with human judges or a theory-backed LLM validation approach with human validation. The brief is explicit that methodological innovation, causal identification, scalable measurement frameworks and novel observational approaches matter far more than proposing new intervention types; proposals need not study Normsy exclusively but must explain how the evaluation design transfers to it. Ethics and IRB considerations are central and Normsy will collaborate with selected researchers on ethics review and implementation planning. Researchers retain publication independence and IP; the partnership is expected to produce data for an academic paper. SUBMIT: one zipped folder through the linked Google Form containing a 3-page proposal (design, work already done, work still needed to scale and implement), a budget document for the USD 20,000, a timeline with concrete deliverables inside 6 months, and short bios for all team members. Award notifications mid-October 2026. Questions to kylan@civichealthproject.org; informal and exploratory conversations welcome.
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.
A fully funded art-science residency from Ars Electronica and Ceske Budejovice, European Capital of Culture 2028, exploring how art and science can collaborate on urgent environmental challenges: climate emergence, sustainable agriculture, geoengineering, permaculture, water resource management, and the broader ecological impacts on local communities. Selected residents work in direct collaboration with local scientists in Ceske Budejovice. WHO CAN APPLY: artists, designers, creatives and artist collectives with more than 5 years of professional creative practice and documented interdisciplinary work; experience in community engagement and science collaborations is essential; applicants must be 18+, of any nationality, and legally eligible to work and travel in the EU. WHAT YOU GET: a EUR 24,000 package (EUR 6,000 artist fee, up to EUR 15,000 production, up to EUR 3,000 travel and subsistence) plus one month of housing covered separately; two winners are selected. STRUCTURE: the residency runs January 2027 to April 2028, with a required on-site stay of up to one month in February/March 2027, an optional stay in August/September 2027, and a March 2028 stay for festival installation, exhibition and deinstallation. HOW TO APPLY: online form with project title, a written proposal of max 250 words, a scientific direction statement (max 100 words), artistic vision (max 100 words), community connection plan (max 100 words), a super short pitch (3 to 30 words), 3 to 7 images, an optional 1-minute video, a portfolio link and contact information. Two-round selection (online application then interview); winners notified by November 2026. Deadline 28 September 2026 at midnight CET.
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.
The ARC Prize Foundation runs its 2026 competition for progress toward artificial general intelligence, with a USD 2,000,000 total prize pool across three tracks: the main Kaggle competition on the ARC-AGI-2 static reasoning benchmark, a track on ARC-AGI-3 interactive agent reasoning (second milestone 30 September 2026), and a paper prize for research that advances understanding of ARC-AGI performance. Milestone prizes run USD 25,000 / 10,000 / 2,500. Open to individuals and teams worldwide, entirely online via Kaggle. Winning entries must be open-sourced under permissive licenses to collect prizes. Main submission deadline 2 November 2026, paper track 8 November 2026; results announced 4 December 2026.
The UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP), funded by Arcadia, grants its ninth cohort of awards to preserve, document and digitize cultural heritage collections at risk from environmental conditions, political uncertainty, inherently unsustainable media, inappropriate storage, or communal and social change. IN SCOPE: 20th and 21st century materials, including print, photographic, film, video, audio, ephemeral and born-digital objects; all funded materials are published open access in the UCLA Library Digital Collections repository. GRANT TYPES: Planning Grants up to USD 20,000 over one year for organization, survey and inventory work before digitization; Project Grants up to USD 70,000 over two years for digitization and metadata creation on collections ready to digitize, or for curating existing digital assets; Regional Grants up to USD 100,000 over two years for digital collections combining materials from three or more institutions, families or archival repositories around one theme, community or historical event, hosted by an organizing institution with prior MEAP grant experience (consult MEAP staff before applying). There is also an invitation-only Emergency Grant track up to USD 10,000 (email meap@library.ucla.edu), and a new AV Grants track up to USD 100,000 for audiovisual archives opening April 2027 with selections in September 2027. TIMELINE: applications opened 14 September 2026; preliminary application webinar 15 October 2026; preliminary applications due Monday 16 November 2026 at 11:59pm Pacific Time via meap.smapply.io; preliminary decisions December 2026; detailed applications due 12 February 2027; awards announced summer 2027. Applications name teams working with the institutions, families or repositories that hold the collections; read the Program Guidelines and Project Eligibility documents on the MEAP site before applying.
The Omidyar Network Tech Journalism Fund offers rolling grants of $5,000-$25,000 for technology journalism projects. Relevant for journalists and media organizations investigating AI, tech policy, and AI's impacts on culture, society, and creative industries. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis through December 31, 2026 — one of the few currently open opportunities with a confirmed near-term deadline. Apply via the application form on omidyar.com.
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.
OSIP is the European Space Agency's standing front door for unsolicited novel ideas, launched in 2019 and now the main entry point for new concepts into ESA, both in response to specific problems and through open calls. HOW IT WORKS: ideas are submitted through two mechanisms. Campaigns are targeted calls responding to specific questions with defined timelines (recent examples include Future Navigation Demonstrators and elements for the EOCognitiveLab mission); Channels are permanently open, open-ended calls on broader topics with no deadline. Submissions can go through an optional community discussion phase, with voting and comments, before expert evaluation by ESA. WHO CAN SUBMIT: individuals, businesses, universities and organisations anywhere in the world. The catch for funding: to implement a funded idea yourself, you must be eligible to do business with ESA under Article 18 of its procurement regulations, which in practice means affiliation with an entity in an ESA member state. WHAT FUNDING LOOKS LIKE: successful ideas are typically supported as co-funded PhD or postdoctoral research (ESA plus a university), early technology development activities, or system studies; amounts vary by route and campaign. WHY IT IS ON THE DESK: this is the one genuinely public, always-open route into ESA for independent researchers, technologists and artists working with space data or space technology concepts; new campaigns appear regularly, so checking the platform periodically is worthwhile. Submit via ideas.esa.int.
Pulitzer Center reporting grants supporting in-depth international journalism on under-reported global issues. Open to reporters, photographers, audio and video journalists, and documentary filmmakers worldwide. Grants cover the hard costs of reporting projects. ELIGIBILITY: professional journalists and visual storytellers anywhere in the world; both freelance and staff. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis via the Pulitzer Center grant portal.
Funds data-driven reporting that uses ML, NLP, satellite imagery, sensors and other computational methods on under-reported issues. Open to freelance and staff data journalists worldwide. Reviewed first-come, first-served on a rolling basis; decisions usually within a month.
The Digital Defenders Partnership runs the main rapid-response fund for digital threats against human rights defenders, journalists, activists and the organisations they work in. The Incident Response Fund covers urgent costs after or during a digital attack, including incident response and forensics, emergency infrastructure or hosting changes, secure devices, account recovery, legal or psychosocial support tied to the incident, and short-term relocation of digital operations. This is the practical counterpart to physical-safety emergency funds for anyone whose work makes them a target online. ELIGIBILITY: human rights defenders, journalists, activists and civil-society organisations facing digital threats or attacks, worldwide. Applications are rolling; DDP aims to respond within two weeks and funds activities for up to four months. DDP also runs a Sustainable Protection Fund for longer-term digital-security capacity building (currently invitation-only in some regions) and an invitation-only Community and Network Fund of up to EUR 15,000 for rapid responders and digital-security facilitators. Contact team@digitaldefenders.org or apply through apply.grants.digitaldefenders.org.
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.
The Center on Long-Term Risk makes rolling grants for research that reduces long-term risks and suffering risks (s-risks) from transformative AI, including AI safety, macrostrategy, cooperative AI and decision theory work. Recipients may be individuals, charitable organizations or academic institutions; funded formats include independent research, academic scholarships and tuition, teaching buyouts and career development for promising researchers. Grant sizes vary widely, from around USD 1,300 to historical grants over USD 250,000, and decisions are made by a simple majority of the three fund managers with external experts consulted as needed. The fund is flexible on project type if it believes you can do high-quality work relevant to s-risks now or in the future. Rolling applications via the online form.
The Institute for Progress pays authors to develop short pitches (200-400 words) into full published project plans for preparing the world for advanced AI, across three areas: accelerating science, strengthening security, and adapting institutions. Authors of selected proposals receive a USD 10,000 honorarium once the full plan is published, plus IFP advisory support, funder matchmaking and help recruiting project leads; USD 1,000 bounties go to successful referrals and published new ideas. Applicants who want to build their own proposal are welcome. Rolling submissions with no deadline; early submissions are prioritized.
MAGIC Grants, a US 501(c)(3), funds applied privacy-technology research and development through its Monero Fund: cryptographic security proofs, membership proofs, privacy, UX and efficiency improvements, audits, and infrastructure in and around the Monero ecosystem. Grants run USD 5,000-20,000 equivalent and are open to all competent researchers regardless of educational attainment, as individuals or teams, internationally (standard US nonprofit due-diligence and sanctions screening applies). One of the few rolling, individual-friendly privacy-tech research funds; decisions typically arrive within three weeks.