The International Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) supports international, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge basic research in the life sciences, encouraging researchers to pursue adventurous ideas with the potential to disrupt established paradigms.

This call funds 3-year (36 months) postdoctoral fellowships to enable researchers to move to a new country and undertake a project distinctly different from their PhD/previous postdoctoral work, without requiring preliminary data. The programme includes a two-step application process (Letter of Intent → invited Full Proposal) and offers flexibility in the third year (stay in the host lab, return to home country, or move to another country, with approval where required).

Objective: Support frontier, high-risk basic life-science research and career-shaping international mobility by enabling fellows to adopt new theories, methods and approaches beyond their previous expertise.

Key formal eligibility conditions include (non-exhaustive; see guidelines for full details):

• One application per year: only one LOI per competition year (either LTF or CDF), and the proposal must include a change in country AND a change in research topic.

• Nationality rule: applicants may be any nationality, but cannot apply to work in the country of their nationality. Non-member-country nationals can only apply to work in an HFSPO member country.

• Host country/institution mobility constraints (all must be met):

  • must change country and the host country must not be the applicant's nationality country,

  • cannot host in the country where the PhD was obtained,

  • must not have studied/worked in the proposed host country for >12 months (cumulative) by activation,

  • if already at the proposed host institution, eligible only if arrived on/after 1 April 2026, and the fellowship must be activated within 12 months of arrival.

  • For-profit research environments are not eligible hosts (collaborations allowed).

• Host supervisor rules: cannot propose host supervisors who are former collaborators/supervisors or those you have worked or published with; ineligible if you have spent >12 months working with the proposed host supervisor by activation; each host supervisor may endorse only one applicant per year.

• PhD timing: not eligible if the doctoral degree was conferred before 24 Sep 2023 (i.e., >36 months before the Full Proposal deadline), with limited exemptions for specific career interruptions that must be discussed with HFSP before initiating the LOI.

• Publication requirement: at least one full-length original research publication in English with the applicant as lead author (review articles/patents do not qualify). At LOI stage, a qualifying lead-author manuscript can be a submitted OA preprint, but this option does not qualify at Full Proposal stage.

• Scientific scope: must be basic, fundamental life-science research, distinctly different from prior work. HFSP does not fund purely applied projects (e.g., primarily clinical/pharma, drug development), purely observational/descriptive screening/data-collection studies, incremental "next step" proposals, projects that are an obvious next step for the host lab, or close continuations of the applicant's prior work.

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