The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists are a set of unrestricted cash prizes recognizing the past achievements and future promise of early-career faculty and postdoctoral researchers in three disciplinary categories: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Chemical Sciences. The program is funded by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and administered by the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), which runs four distinct award tracks — National (United States), Regional (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut), United Kingdom, and Israel (the last co-administered with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Because every track is nomination-only, research administrators and offices of research are the ones who actually operationalize this award: identifying eligible faculty, routing an internal nomination decision through institutional leadership, and assembling the nomination package before the annual deadline. This guide covers eligibility, the institutional nomination workflow, and award structure across all four tracks, and how the process differs from a standard grant or career development award application.
What the Blavatnik Awards recognize
Unlike a research grant, which funds a specific proposed project, the Blavatnik Awards recognize a nominee’s body of work to date and their trajectory going forward — the cash is unrestricted, meaning laureates and finalists are not required to spend it on a particular research plan or report back on its use the way they would for a federal award administered under 2 CFR 200 Uniform Guidance-style terms. Every track evaluates nominees in the same three disciplinary categories:
- Life Sciences — biology, biomedicine, and related fields
- Physical Sciences & Engineering — physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science
- Chemical Sciences — chemistry and chemical engineering
One nominee in each category is typically named a Laureate; a further group of nominees in each category is named a Finalist. Selection is made by discipline-specific juries of senior scientists convened by NYAS, working from the nomination materials each institution submits — there is no direct application path for an individual researcher outside the National Institutes of Health early-career researcher mechanisms more familiar to a US grants office, such as the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award; a candidate cannot apply directly.
The four Blavatnik Award tracks
The eligibility pool, career stage, and prize amounts differ meaningfully by track, which is the detail research administrators most often need clarified:
- National Awards (United States) — open to tenured or tenure-track faculty (or the equivalent) at eligible US institutions who hold a doctorate and serve as principal investigator on their own research program.
- Regional Awards (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) — open specifically to postdoctoral researchers, not faculty, at eligible institutions in those three states.
- United Kingdom Awards — open to researchers holding an academic staff appointment at an eligible UK institution who conduct research independently; those with dual appointments must work at least 50% full-time at the nominating institution.
- Israel Awards — co-administered with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; open to scientists in Israel under an upper age limit rather than a faculty-status test, and explicitly welcomes nominations of candidates from groups underrepresented in science and engineering.
All four tracks are nomination-only and exclude self-nominations. Because eligibility, deadlines, and required materials are set independently by NYAS for each track and do change from cycle to cycle, a nominating office should always confirm current-cycle specifics directly against the official guidelines at blavatnikawards.org before beginning the internal nomination process, rather than relying on a prior year’s rules.
Eligibility criteria in detail
Across the National, UK, and Israel tracks, three eligibility tests recur, though the specific thresholds are reset each cycle and vary by track:
- Age or career-stage cutoff. The National and UK Awards use a birth-year cutoff that shifts forward each nomination cycle (for example, the 2026 National cycle required nominees to have been born in or after 1984, while the concurrent UK cycle used 1985) — the effect is a rolling window of roughly the same length rather than a fixed age. The Israel Awards instead use a flat upper age limit. Written institutional requests for an age exception (for circumstances such as parental leave or serious illness) are accepted by some tracks ahead of the nomination deadline.
- Doctorate requirement. Nominees must hold a doctoral degree — PhD, DPhil, MD, DDS, DVM, or an equivalent research doctorate.
- Independent research position. National and UK nominees must currently hold an independent faculty or academic staff appointment and function as principal investigator on their own research program; Regional nominees are evaluated as postdoctoral scientists working under a faculty mentor rather than as independent PIs.
None of the four tracks accepts a self-nomination — every nomination has to originate from an authorized nominator, which is the mechanism the next section covers.
The institutional nomination process
This is the part of the program that most resembles a grants-office workflow, and where a sponsored programs office typically gets involved:
- Identify eligible candidates. A department, dean’s office, or central research office identifies faculty (or, for the Regional track, postdocs) who meet the current cycle’s age/career-stage, doctorate, and appointment criteria in one of the three disciplinary categories.
- Route through institutional leadership. On the US National track, a nomination must be submitted by the institution’s president, vice president, or director — or their official designee, which in practice is usually the office of research or the provost’s office. The UK track similarly requires an official institutional nominator rather than a department chair acting alone.
- Respect the per-institution nomination cap. Each institution may generally submit up to three nominations in a given cycle — one per disciplinary category — through its standard institutional channel. Separately, individuals who sit on the program’s Scientific Advisory Council, or who are past Laureates, may nominate candidates outside that per-institution cap, though typically limited to one nominee per institution.
- Assemble the nomination package and submit by the deadline. Required materials (a nomination statement, CV, and supporting letters, per the current cycle’s published instructions) are submitted through the program’s online nomination portal ahead of a fall deadline; exact opening and closing dates are published separately for each track and change year to year, so they should be pulled fresh from the current cycle’s “Important Dates” page rather than assumed to repeat.
For a research administration office, the practical parallel is closer to managing a limited-submission internal competition — the kind used for institutionally capped funding opportunities — than to processing an open-eligibility grant application: the office’s real work is candidate identification, internal deconfliction against the per-category cap, and routing the leadership sign-off, not budget development.
Award structure and amounts
Prize amounts are unrestricted funds paid directly to the individual, not project funding disbursed to the institution, and they differ by track. Amounts below reflect recently published cycles; always confirm the current cycle’s figures before communicating them to a nominee, since the foundation has periodically revised amounts:
- National Awards: one Laureate per category receives US$250,000; additional nominees per category are named Finalists and receive US$15,000 each.
- Regional Awards: Laureates receive US$30,000 and Finalists receive US$10,000.
- United Kingdom Awards: Laureates receive £100,000 per category; Finalists receive £30,000 each.
- Israel Awards: Laureates receive US$100,000 per category.
Because the funds are unrestricted personal awards rather than sponsored project funding, they typically do not flow through an institution’s grants accounting system the way a federal or foundation project grant would, which is a distinction worth flagging to a first-time nominee who assumes it will be handled like any other award notice.
Frequently asked questions
Can a researcher nominate themselves for a Blavatnik Award?
No. All four tracks are nomination-only and explicitly prohibit self-nomination. A nomination has to come from an authorized institutional nominator (or, outside the institutional cap, from a Scientific Advisory Council member or past Laureate).
What is the difference between the Blavatnik National and Regional Awards?
The National Awards are open to tenured or tenure-track faculty across the United States who serve as principal investigator on their own research. The Regional Awards are open specifically to postdoctoral researchers — not independent faculty — at institutions in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and carry smaller prize amounts than the National track.
How many nominations can one institution submit?
Generally up to three per cycle on a given track — one nominee per disciplinary category — submitted through the institution’s official nomination channel, separate from the additional nominations Scientific Advisory Council members and past Laureates may submit.
Do Blavatnik Award winners have to report on how they spend the prize?
No. The funds are described as unrestricted, distinguishing them from project-based research funding that carries budget, reporting, and allowability requirements.
Where can a research administrator find the current nomination deadlines and eligibility rules?
Directly at the official program site, blavatnikawards.org, under each track’s own “Nomination Guidelines” and “Important Dates” pages — figures such as the birth-year cutoff and prize amounts are reset by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and NYAS each cycle and should not be assumed to carry over from a prior year.
For related institutional award and career-stage funding mechanisms, see CASRAI’s guides to the Royal Society research grants and fellowships, the Wellcome Career Development Award, and the MRC Career Development Award, or return to the Grants Management & Research Funding hub for the full cluster.
