At the University of Freiburg, one of Germany’s oldest and most prestigious universities, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) offers fellowships for researchers from all countries and disciplines to pursue their projects within a vibrant academic community.
Our programme for the Academic Year 2026/27:
🔹 Early Career Fellowships
PhD obtained within the last 8 years
at least 6 months of international academic experience
duration: 4–10 months
🔹 Senior Fellowships
PhD and at least 8 years of postdoc experience
at least 6 months of international academic experience
duration: 3–8 months
🔹 Sustainable Governance Senior Fellowship for researchers based in Africa
Affiliated with an African academic institution
PhD and 8+ years of postdoc experience
at least 6 months of international academic experience
Informational graphic for the FRIAS Fellowship Programmes 2026/27. It lists three types of fellowships:
Early Career Fellowships – 4 to 10 months for researchers with a doctoral degree and up to 8 years of postdoctoral experience.
Senior Fellowships – 3 to 8 months for researchers with a doctoral degree and at least 8 years of postdoctoral experience.
Sustainable Governance Senior Fellowship Programme for Researchers from Africa – 6 months for researchers with a doctoral degree, at least 8 years of postdoctoral experience, and affiliation with an institution in Africa.
Application deadline: 13 September 2025, 13:00.
Neue #Workshops für #Postdocs im Sommersemester 2025:
Ab sofort können sich promovierte Wissenschaftler*innen der #UniFreiburg für das neue Sommersemesterprogramm „Learning & Development“ des Centre for Advanced Researcher Development (CARD) anmelden.
#Postdocs and #PhD students hit hard by Trump’s crackdown on #science, anxiety and fear grip early-career researchers.
Month of repeated threats to #US science funding, many early-career researchers are fearing for their careers. #Scientists especially vulnerable: graduate students, postdocs and scientists just starting their own labs are the researchers most likely to be living pay cheque to pay cheque, most reliant on federal grants for their income. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00550-0#PhDLife#PhDChat
Im almost 2 years into a project where I have almost finished rearchitecting the de facto standard for my field from the ground up, in doing so making heavy contribution to surrounding projects rather than wandering off on my own - which would have certainly yielded a paper in a high impact journal sooner, but been worse for open source and the tooling landscape. If I have to be out in 5 years then that would be how I had to work if I wanted to still be in academic research.
That project is about shifting the backbone of the tooling ecosystem for research from start to finish, not just for my field and this format, but very generalizably. Im in a lab and collaborating with ppl who make a big chunk of the open source hardware in our field, and we're also rebuilding the acquisition software system to plug directly into extensible vernacular schemas that can be massively interoperable. Rearchitecting data standards is also an ethical project, to enable a new kind of p2p system that stands a plausible chance of being an alternative to the inevitable future of the NIH giving 1/3 of its budget to Amazon and google for cloud hosting. That work is continuous with what we're doing over here on neuromatchstodon, bc my work is putting these data formats directly into linked data standards - in a way that actually works - so we can build distributed systems of communication to be able to share work and assign credit across the lifespan of an experiment, a protocol-based alternative to the journal system.
None of that work fits into a system of support where in 5 years I need to have enough prestige pubs to land a faculty position. That work really can only be done by postdocs and staff scientists. So that kind of integrative work addressing foundational problems in research would simply become impossible, rather than heavily disincentivized. hit up the rfi