Postdoctoral fellowship

A postdoctoral fellowship is a specific way a period of mentored postdoctoral research is funded, not just another name for the postdoctoral role itself. The defining feature is who holds the award: a postdoctoral fellowship is applied for and held in the individual researcher’s own name, rather than paid to them as an employee out of a principal investigator’s research grant or held by their department as an institutional training-grant slot. That distinction — individually competed, individually held, typically portable — is what separates a fellowship from the other two funding routes described on CASRAI’s postdoctoral researcher entry, and it has real downstream consequences for tax treatment, benefits, grants administration, and what happens if the fellow wants to move institutions.

What makes an award a “fellowship,” operationally

Four features together distinguish an individual postdoctoral fellowship from a grant-funded staff position or an institutional training-grant slot:

• Individually competed and held. The researcher applies directly (often with a named faculty sponsor or mentor), and the award is issued in their name — not to their employing institution and not to a principal investigator’s grant.
• A stipend or salary plus, often, a separate allowance. Funders typically provide a living stipend (or, where the fellow is employed under a host-country contract, a salary) alongside a distinct research, travel, or relocation allowance, rather than folding everything into one undifferentiated grant budget line.
• Fixed-term and mentored. Like the postdoctoral role generally, the award funds a defined period — commonly two to three years — of research training under a named mentor, not an open-ended position.
• Portable. Because the award belongs to the individual rather than the institution, most postdoctoral fellowships can move with the fellow to a different (funder-approved) host institution, which a staff position funded from a specific PI’s grant cannot do.

Major postdoctoral fellowship programs, by funder type

US federal. NIH’s principal individual mechanism is the F32 (Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship) — the postdoctoral-stage counterpart to the predoctoral F31, funding up to three years of mentored training with a named sponsor, typically at an institution other than the one that granted the doctorate. NSF does not run one universal postdoctoral fellowship; instead it funds a family of individual, portable, directorate-specific programs — including Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB), the Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (MSPRF), Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships, SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, and an Engineering Postdoctoral Fellowship — each an individual award providing a stipend plus a research/travel allowance, portable to an NSF-approved host institution.

Private foundations. A number of disease- and field-specific foundations fund named individual postdoctoral fellowships on the same basic structure: the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation’s Fellowship Award, the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research fellowship, the Human Frontier Science Program’s Long-Term Fellowships (three years of salary plus a research/travel allowance for frontier life-sciences research), and EMBO’s Postdoctoral Fellowships (up to two years, funded either as a host-institution employment contract within EMBC member states or as a stipend elsewhere, plus relocation and dependent-child allowances).

European Union. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) fund Postdoctoral Fellowships under Horizon Europe — the current name for what was called “Individual Fellowships” under the predecessor Horizon 2020 programme. MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships sit alongside other Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions aimed at earlier career stages, such as the predoctoral Doctoral Networks (the renamed successor to Innovative Training Networks), which fund cohort-based training rather than individual postdoctoral awards.

National research councils outside the US and EU — for example Canada’s NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, and the UK’s ESRC and other UKRI councils — run their own individual postdoctoral fellowship programs following broadly the same structure (individually competed, portable, stipend-based). Program-specific eligibility and mechanics vary by council and are outside the scope of this general definition.

Employee or fellow: why the distinction matters operationally

As CASRAI’s postdoctoral researcher entry describes in more depth, US institutions generally track a postdoc’s employment classification to their funding source: a postdoc paid directly from a PI’s research grant is typically appointed as an institutional employee (salary, payroll withholding), while a postdoc holding an individual fellowship is more often classified as a trainee or fellow (stipend, generally not treated as wages) — even when the two do identical work in the same lab. That classification affects payroll tax treatment, eligibility for institutional employee benefits, and which office (human resources versus a fellowships or graduate-studies office) actually administers the appointment.

Fellowship funding also typically reaches the host institution differently than a research grant does. Where a research grant reimburses the institution’s costs through a negotiated Facilities & Administrative (F&A/indirect cost) rate, NIH’s individual NRSA fellowships instead provide a fixed institutional allowance per fellow — a flat amount covering supplies, travel, and other training costs rather than a percentage-of-direct-costs indirect rate. Other funders structure this differently again (EMBO and HFSP, for instance, pay allowances for relocation and dependents rather than an institutional overhead payment) — the mechanism varies by funder, but the underlying pattern is consistent: an individual fellowship’s institutional payment is structured differently from a project grant’s negotiated indirect costs.

How this differs from a T32 training-grant slot

An NIH T32 institutional training grant funds postdoctoral (and predoctoral) training too, and a trainee on a T32 slot is sometimes informally described as a “fellow.” But operationally a T32 slot is not an individual fellowship: the department or program — not the individual trainee — applies to NIH and holds the award, then nominates trainees into a fixed number of slots it administers. The trainee does not individually compete for or hold the funding the way an F32 or NSF fellowship recipient does, and a T32 slot is generally not portable to another institution the way an individually-held fellowship is.

References

• NIH NIGMS, Individual Postdoctoral Fellowships (F32) program description (nigms.nih.gov); grants.nih.gov/funding/activity-codes/F32
• NSF, “Funding for Postdoctoral Researchers” (nsf.gov/funding/postdocs), including the Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology, Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, MPS Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, and Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships program pages
• Human Frontier Science Program, Postdoctoral Fellowships (hfsp.org/funding/hfsp-funding/postdoctoral-fellowships)
• EMBO, Postdoctoral Fellowships — Benefits (embo.org/funding/fellowships-grants-and-career-support/postdoctoral-fellowships)
• European Commission, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships (Horizon Europe)