Are you an early career researcher thinking about pursuing a career in academia? Then it is worth considering applying for a postdoctoral fellowship as your next career move. Fellowships enable you to take that next step towards independence and they are designed to help early career researchers transition to becoming a research group leader.
Applying for a fellowship takes a considerable amount of time, preparation and perseverance. However, if you are successful then it can give you a real competitive advantage when you come to apply for permanent academic positions. There are now a several different fellowships available for early career postdocs (and final year PhD students) and we have included a short list of five upcoming UK opportunities in the table below that might be of interest to researchers at this stage.
| Funding organisation & fellowship type | Eligibility | Next deadline | Link & more information |
| Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowships | All postdocs | 25.02.21 | https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/early-career-fellowships |
| Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowships | Final year PhD & early career postdocs | 23.03.21 | https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/schemes/sir-henry-wellcome-postdoctoral-fellowships |
| Wellcome Research Fellowships in Humanities and Social Science | All postdocs | 16.06.21 | https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/schemes/research-fellowships-humanities-and-social-science |
| Royal Society University Research Fellowship | 3 – 8 years of postdoctoral experience | 07.09.21 | https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/grants/university-research/ |
| Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship | Postdocs (with up to a max six years of postdoc research experience since PhD) | 10.11.21 | https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/grants/dorothy-hodgkin-fellowship/ |
There are many more fellowships available and they all have different eligibility requirements and expectations of applicants. Therefore, the eligibility parameters for a particular fellowship scheme may mean that it is only open to researchers from within a specific career stage (e.g. within 3 years of your PhD), a certain subject area or to those who can meet certain international mobility requirements.
If you are interested in applying for a postdoctoral fellowship then we recommend that you explore the range of available fellowships and select the ones that are most relevant to you. For a more comprehensive list of fellowships, you may wish to explore Research Professional database, which contains a freely available list of opportunities.
Our upcoming Electv Training half day course, Attracting funding: writing & applying for postdoctoral fellowships, will be running on Friday 15th January and will focus on how to apply for a fellowship. The course is open to anyone to attend and will include further information on the application process, expectations of applicants, details from the instructor’s own experience of obtaining a fellowship and a more detailed list of upcoming fellowship opportunities and deadlines in 2021.
The course is run by Electv Training and will be delivered online. This is a popular course and it runs every three months, the next course will be in spring 2021. If you have any questions about the course then please email us at enquiries@electv.net
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