Deadline to Request Harvard Institutional Endorsement: September 14, 2021 by 10:00 AM

Sponsor Deadline: September 22, 2021
Award Amount: $70,000 per year for two years (taxable)

The objective of the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships Program, offered by the Government of Canada, is to attract and retain top-tier postdoctoral talent, to develop Fellows’ leadership potential and to position them for success as research leaders of tomorrow, positively contributing to Canada's economic, social and research-based growth through a research-intensive career. Applications are accepted from all fields in the humanities, social sciences, health research, natural sciences and engineering.

This program is open to Canadian citizens, permanent residents of Canada and non-Canadian citizens. Candidates to be hosted by Harvard must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada who have obtained or will obtain their PhD or equivalent from a Canadian university. Applicants must fulfill or have fulfilled all degree requirements for a PhD, PhD-equivalent or health professional degree between September 15, 2018 and September 30, 2022 (inclusively), and before the start date of their award. Applicants who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada may apply to hold a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at a Canadian institution. Applicants who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents of Canada and who obtained their PhD, PhD-equivalent or health professional degree from a non-Canadian university may also apply to hold a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at a Canadian institution. The program’s full eligibility criteria can be viewed here.   

There are no limits to the number of applicants that may apply to the Banting Fellowship opportunity, but those who wish to be hosted by Harvard University must include with their application an Institutional Letter of Endorsement signed by the Vice Provost for Research. To request this endorsement letter, candidates must submit their contact information and a copy of their proposed supervisor's statement here no later than 10:00 AM on September 14, 2021. 

The Trust makes grant awards twice a year to nonprofit organizations in the city of Boston and contiguous communities, as well as to organizations in which Cabot family members maintain philanthropic interest. Awards are put to work in the areas of arts and culture, education and youth development, environment and conservation, health and human services, and for civic and public benefit. Within these fields, as appropriate, the trustees prefer programs mainly serving youth and young adults, with a special interest in programs focused on insuring the healthy growth and development of infants and young children, as a foundation for their future success. Applications recommended for review meet the following criteria:

• Reflect Cabot family interests and provide benefits to communities and organizations that have been supported by family philanthropy;
• Extend important services to individuals and groups not served adequately through other programs and institutions;
• Manage change by assessing community needs and developing programs to meet emerging needs;
• Promote productive cooperation and full use of resources by nonprofit organizations and community groups; and
• Test new approaches to problems or adapt solutions that have been successful elsewhere.

• Marjorie Kovler Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $5,000 for research on foreign intelligence and the presidency, or a related topic.
• Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $5,000. Preference is given to research in either of the following areas: the foreign policy of the Kennedy Presidency, especially in the Western Hemisphere; or the Kennedy Administration's domestic policy, particularly with regard to racial justice or the conservation of natural resources.
• Abba P. Schwartz Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $3,100. Preference is given to research on immigration, naturalization, or refugee policy.
• Theodore C. Sorensen Research Fellowship: Offers a stipend of up to $3,600. Preference is given to research on domestic policy, political journalism, polling, or press relations.

• Innovative research into the causes, the prevention and/or the alleviation of learning disabilities
• Distinctive public awareness programs to advance public understanding of the needs of persons with learning disabilities
• Innovative programs to advance the achievement of persons with learning disabilities, increase the support skills of their families, support academic and professional advisors, and enhance the understanding of learning disabilities by their colleagues and employer

The Max Weber Foundation (MWS) confers Gerald D. Feldman Travel Grants to young academics with an international focus. The travel grants are meant to improve the career opportunities for humanities and social science academics in their qualification phase. The scientists conduct a self-chosen research project in at least two and at most three host countries which are home to MWS institutes and branches or at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History. The total term of funding shall not exceed three months. Placements (at most one month per host country, shorter stays are possible) are to be used for research, especially in libraries and archives. Academics are expected to produce transnational and transregional studies, providing research with new and original ideas. 

The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study awards 10-15 residential Faculty Fellowships annually to researchers whose work addresses the Institute’s yearly Research Theme. During the 2022-2023 academic year, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study is sponsoring research projects that investigate the concept of The Public from many disciplines and applications. The project will bring together humanists, scientists, social scientists, legal scholars, and artists to examine how we organize individuals, political and scientific institutions, cultural resources, and informational structures into public, private, and expert domains. Potential research proposal topics on The Public may address, but are not limited to:

• Public Health: How can we make health systems that better reflect the diversity of the populations they are meant to serve? How can scientists better inform debates about what governments mandate from a public health perspective? What research trends now will inform the future of public-facing sciences?
• Environmental Science and Humanities: What role can public institutions play in addressing large-scale collective action problems involving the natural world? Taking into account our best science, what detrimental environmental trends are best addressed by public interventions vs. private or individual interventions?
• Technology and Engineering: How has the emergence and spread of social media transformed the conception of the public sphere? How might developments in data analysis and surveillance challenge individuals’ relationships with governments and private entities? As engineering gets more and more advanced, what role do engineers have in helping the public understand the products they create? What can research show us about the future of digital public life?
• Political Science and Law: What is “the public” and how many publics are there? What are the barriers to enter/exit a public sphere? What moral obligations do political institutions have to create or remove such barriers? What can research show us about the future of civic life in different regional contexts and the future of public service careers?
• Architecture / Urban Planning: What public spaces belong in modern cities and how should they be designed and maintained? How should we understand infrastructure in the 21st century?
• Philosophy and Social Theory: Do large groups have rights, or are rights only held by individuals? What does it mean for evidence or reasons to be public? Does it matter for standards of rationality if we have reasons that cannot be widely shared? How should political, educational, and economic institutions balance meritocratic, egalitarian, and democratic values?
• History and Literature: How have our concepts of what characterizes the public realm developed over time or changed in light of recent disruptions? What role have public intellectuals had in the past, and how do they compare to public-facing intellectuals of the present? How do literature and history shed light on the difficulties individuals face entering or exiting public life?
• Religion: How should we understand institutional disaffiliation trends among religions, accelerated by recent crises? What duties do we have to create or limit religious ideas in the public sphere? To what extent is religion a common good, and how does it compete with other common goods? What should public theology look like going forward?
• Arts and Culture: How do arts and culture help us understand what it is to be a unified or disunified public, or help us understand the extent to which arts and culture have duties to the public? The NDIAS is also interested in supporting creative works—fiction writing, visual arts, musical composition, etc.—that explore or address issues related to our theme.

Through its grant-making, the foundation seeks to develop solutions to the country’s most important and challenging domestic policy issues. Recognizing that good policymaking relies on the availability of high-quality research, the foundation invests primarily in scholarship that results in the publication of books, journal articles, and policy papers. Funding is typically provided in the form of research grants, fellowships, and other types of targeted project support. With the foundation’s assistance, university and think tank scholars investigate a wide range of issues, including:

• Tax and budget policy
• Cost-benefit analysis of regulatory practices and proposals
• The workings of the legal system
• Environmental policy
• Social welfare reform
• K-12 and higher education policy

The Small Research Grants Program supports education research projects that will contribute to the improvement of education, broadly conceived. Projects may range from one to five years in length. This program is “field-initiated” in that proposal submissions are not in response to a specific request for a particular research topic, discipline, design, method, or location. The goal for this program is to support rigorous, intellectually ambitious and technically sound research that is relevant to the most pressing questions and compelling opportunities in education.

• Army Research Office (ARO)
• Office of Naval Research (ONR)
• Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)

• Topic 1: Social Network-Transcendent Behavioral Dynamics
• Topic 2: Microelectronic Test Science Exploiting Latent Energy and Electromagnetic Radiation
• Topic 3: Cavity Molecular Polaritons
• Topic 4: Effects of Radiation Damage on Performance of Wide-Bandgap Electronics
• Topic 5: Understanding Neural Systems Integration for Competent Autonomy in Decision and Control
• Topic 6: Nonlinear Optical Material Design with Extreme Interband Nonlinearities
• Topic 7: Synthetic Quantum Matter
• Topic 8: Composability of Synthetic Biological Circuits

• Topic 9: Bio-architected Responsive Materials with 3D Nanoscale Order
• Topic 10: Topological Seeds of Complex Response in Materials
• Topic 11: Connectivity and Transport in Disordered Hyperuniform Networks
• Topic 12: Irregular Metamaterial Networks
• Topic 13: Uncovering the Underlying Neurobiological Mechanisms of Cognitive Fatigue
• Topic 14: Gut-Neuronal Signaling Through Polymeric Mucin via Chemical Probes and Imaging
• Topic 15: ELECTROBIOLOGY: Electronic Control of Biological Communication

• Topic 16: Novel Routes to Majorana Qubits for Topologically-Protected Quantum Information
• Topic 17: Molecular Doping of Organic Electronic Materials
• Topic 18: Learning from Hearing
• Topic 19: Hydrodynamics of Fish Schooling
• Topic 20: Self-learning for Real-world Perception
• Topic 21: Fundamental Non-equilibrium Processes in Weakly Ionized Hypersonic Flows
• Topic 22: Ab Initio Understanding of Detonation Based Combustion in Multiphase Mixtures
• Topic 23: Bioinspired Design of Energy-Self Sufficient Multi-functional Soft Material Systems
• Topic 24: Systems-Level Foundations for Agile, Dynamic, and Ad Hoc Human Autonomy Teams
• Topic 25: Environmental DNA-based Monitoring of the Marine Environment (EDMON)

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks projects that encourage public engagement with historical records, including the development of new tools that enable people to engage online. The NHPRC is looking for projects that create models and technologies that other institutions can freely adopt. In general, collaborations between archivists, documentary editors, historians, educators, and/or community-based individuals are more likely to create a competitive proposal. Projects that focus on innovative methods to introduce primary source materials and how to use them in multiple locations also are more likely to create a competitive proposal. Projects might create and develop programs to engage people in the study and use of historical records for institutional, educational or personal reasons. For example, an applicant can:

• Enlist volunteer “citizen archivists” in projects to accelerate access to historical records, especially those online. This may include, but is not limited to, efforts to identify, tag, transcribe, annotate, or otherwise enhance digitized historical records.
• Develop educational programs for K-12 students, undergraduate classes, or community members that encourage them to engage with historical records already in repositories or that are collected as part of the project.
• Collect primary source material from people through public gatherings and sponsor discussions or websites about the results.
• Use historical records in artistic endeavors. This could include K-12 students, undergraduate classes, or community members. Examples include projects that encourage researching and writing life stories for performance; using record facsimiles in painting, sculpture, or audiovisual collages; or using text as lyrics for music or as music.
• Develop technologies that encourage the sharing of information about historical records.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission seeks proposals to publish documentary editions of historical records. The NHPRC especially welcomes projects that focus on broad historical movements in U.S. history, such as law (including the social and cultural history of the law), politics, social reform, business, military, the arts, and other aspects of the national experience, including any aspect of African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American history. Projects may also center on the papers of major figures from American history.

The Commission is especially interested in projects to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The NHPRC encourages applications that use collections to examine the ideals behind the founding of the United States and the continual interpretation and debate over those ideals over the past 250 years. The NHPRC welcomes projects that engage the public, expand civic education, and promote understanding of the nation’s history, democracy, and culture from the founding era to the present day.

• U.S. Global Development Lab: Development Innovation Ventures - Rolling
• See all USAID Opportunities