The Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) is an international funder that supports frontier life-science research combining biology with physics, chemistry, computer science, engineering, or mathematics. Administered by the HFSP Organization in Strasbourg, France, and jointly funded by national governments and the European Union, HFSP does not fund single-institution or single-country projects — every award requires genuine cross-border collaboration.
What makes HFSP different from a national funding agency
Most funders a research office deals with day to day, from NIH and NSF to national research councils, are single-country bodies that fund researchers based (mostly) within their own borders. HFSP inverts that model. It exists specifically to fund teams whose members are based in different countries and, in the case of its flagship Research Grants, requires that structure as a condition of eligibility rather than treating international collaboration as a bonus.
HFSP is governed and financed by its Management Supporting Parties (MSPs): the governments of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus the European Union, which contributes on behalf of EU member states that are not themselves G7 countries. A separate, broader list of HFSP member countries defines whose researchers are eligible to lead or join a funded team; this list is substantially larger than the MSP list and includes most EU member states individually (for example Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden, among others) alongside Norway, South Africa, and the MSP countries themselves. A research administrator’s first step in scoping an HFSP application should be confirming that every proposed team member’s institution is in a current HFSP member country, since this list is maintained and updated by HFSP directly.
HFSP’s three funding mechanisms
HFSP runs three distinct award types, aimed at different career stages and different kinds of researcher mobility. All three sit under the same governing principle — genuinely novel, cross-border, interdisciplinary life-science research — but the eligibility rules, team structure, and funding mechanics differ substantially between them.
1. Research Grants (Program Grants and Early Career Grants)
HFSP Research Grants fund teams, not individuals. A team must have two to four members, each based in a different country, each holding a doctoral degree (PhD, MD, or equivalent), and each directing their own independent research group with the freedom to determine the course of the HFSP-funded project. Normally only one team member per country is allowed; two members from the same country are accepted only when they can demonstrate genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration between themselves, in which case they are jointly counted as 1.5 members for funding purposes.
HFSP offers this at two tiers:
- Early Career Grants — every team member must be within five years of having obtained an independent research position, and must have received their doctoral degree no more than ten years before the Letter of Intent deadline.
- Program Grants — open to teams at any career stage, though HFSP encourages early-career participation on these teams as well.
Both run for a fixed three-year term. Funding is set by team size rather than by a submitted line-item budget — HFSP does not ask applicants to justify detailed costs the way a typical federal grant does. Funds are intended to support the research itself (for example, salaries or stipends for research assistants working on the project), not the principal investigators’ own salaries, general faculty compensation, or student tuition. Where a team includes a member based at a for-profit organization, the award is reduced (for example, a two-member team with one for-profit member receives half the standard annual award for that size of team).
The eligibility bar that trips up the most applicants is the novelty and prior-collaboration rule: HFSP expects that team members have not previously collaborated together, and typically will not have co-authored original research prior to applying. The proposed project itself must also represent a genuinely new direction for each investigator rather than an incremental extension of work already underway in their own lab — reviewers are explicitly looking for projects that would not happen without the specific international, interdisciplinary team HFSP is being asked to fund. HFSP also weighs geographic diversity in review: teams drawn entirely from Europe, or entirely from North America, are described by HFSP as rarely successful, since the program is looking for genuinely intercontinental combinations of expertise.
The review process runs in two stages. Applicants first submit a Letter of Intent (LOI), which undergoes an eligibility pre-screen followed by peer review by HFSP’s Review Committee against criteria of novelty, interdisciplinarity, and how well the proposed team is actually integrated around a shared question. Only a small fraction of LOIs — historically in the range of 10-15% — are invited to submit a Full Proposal. Full Proposals are then reviewed by Review Committee members together with external referees, and a much smaller fraction of the original LOI pool is ultimately funded. Final funding decisions require endorsement from both HFSP’s Council of Scientists and its Board of Trustees. Because exact Letter of Intent and Full Proposal deadlines shift slightly cycle to cycle, a research office should always confirm the current year’s dates directly on hfsp.org’s Research Grants page rather than relying on a previous cycle’s calendar.
2. Postdoctoral Fellowships (Long-Term and Cross-Disciplinary)
HFSP Fellowships are individual, portable postdoctoral awards, held by the fellow rather than paid to an institution, and are structured around the same mobility principle as the Research Grants: a fellow is expected to carry out their funded research in a laboratory in a country other than the one where they earned their PhD or are currently working. HFSP runs two tracks:
- Long-Term Fellowships — for applicants who hold a PhD in a biological topic and want to pursue a novel, frontier project in the life sciences, typically in a new host laboratory and country.
- Cross-Disciplinary Fellowships — for applicants whose doctoral training is in a non-biological discipline (physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, or computer science) who want to move into life-science research, reflecting HFSP’s broader mandate to fund work at the boundary between biology and the physical/quantitative sciences.
Both tracks run for three years and provide a living allowance plus a separate research and travel allowance; depending on individual circumstances, fellows may also qualify for a child allowance, a parental-leave allowance, or a relocation allowance. Total award value depends on the host country’s cost of living rather than being a flat figure worldwide, so a research office should treat any specific dollar total as illustrative rather than a fixed number to quote to a candidate without checking the current fellowship page.
3. Career Development Award
The Career Development Award (CDA) is aimed at HFSP’s own fellowship alumni — researchers who held a Long-Term or Cross-Disciplinary Fellowship and are moving into their first independent research position. It is the one HFSP mechanism where the standard Research Grant rule requiring the Principal Applicant to already hold a laboratory in an HFSP member country does not strictly apply in the same way, reflecting its purpose as a bridge from fellowship to independent group leadership. Because CDA eligibility depends on an applicant’s specific fellowship history and destination country, a research office supporting a candidate for this award should confirm current terms directly with HFSP rather than assuming Research Grant rules carry over.
Eligibility checklist for a research office
Before encouraging a PI to pursue an HFSP Research Grant, a sponsored-programs office can save significant effort by checking these structural requirements up front, since they eliminate a large share of otherwise-strong proposals:
- Team, not solo application. A Research Grant needs two to four independent investigators, based in different HFSP member countries.
- No single-country or single-continent teams. All-domestic teams are ineligible for Research Grants by design; all-European or all-North American teams are, in practice, rarely funded even where nominally eligible.
- No existing collaboration. Team members generally should not have worked together or co-published original research before the application; the project must be a genuinely new direction, not the next incremental step for any one lab.
- PI must direct an independent lab. Every team member needs a doctoral degree and their own independent research group, with real freedom to shape the HFSP-funded project — postdocs and other non-independent researchers are not eligible as team members on a Research Grant (though they may well be the ones actually doing the funded work).
- Career stage determines the tier. Early Career Grants require every team member to be within five years of an independent position and within ten years of their doctorate at the LOI deadline; Program Grants have no such ceiling.
- Budget planning is different from a typical federal award. Because funding is set by team size rather than a submitted budget, and cannot cover PI salary or student tuition, a research office should set expectations early about what the award will and will not cover locally.
How HFSP fits into a broader international funding strategy
HFSP is a useful option specifically when a PI’s project genuinely depends on combining expertise that does not exist together in one country — a structural biology lab pairing with a computational physics group on opposite sides of the world is the kind of proposal HFSP is designed for, not a conventional single-lab biology project with an international co-author added for the application. Research offices working across borders more broadly may also find it useful to compare HFSP’s structure against other funders in CASRAI’s guides to national and multinational funding bodies, including JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) and its JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Overseas Researchers, Research Ireland (Taighde Éireann), and NSERC’s CREATE program for training-focused international collaboration in Canada. For general orientation to how research administration divides pre-award and post-award work, see CASRAI’s grants management pillar page, and for the underlying role definition, see the dictionary entry on the principal investigator and on the postdoctoral fellowship as a funding mechanism.
Frequently asked questions
Does HFSP fund clinical or applied research?
No. HFSP’s mandate is basic, frontier research into fundamental biological problems, with an emphasis on approaches that cross disciplinary and national boundaries. Applied, clinical, or product-development-oriented proposals are not the intended scope.
Can a team include a member from a non-member country?
Eligibility to lead or join an HFSP-funded team is limited to researchers based in current HFSP member countries. A research office should verify each collaborator’s country against HFSP’s current member list before a team is assembled, since the list is maintained directly by HFSP and can change.
Is prior collaboration an absolute bar to applying?
HFSP’s guidance frames this as a strong expectation rather than a rigid disqualifying rule in every case: reviewers are assessing whether the proposed work is genuinely novel for the team and not an extension of existing joint work. A team with any prior joint publication history should expect reviewers to scrutinize novelty especially closely.
How does the Career Development Award differ from a Research Grant or Fellowship?
The Research Grant and both Fellowship tracks fund, respectively, established independent teams and individual postdoctoral researchers. The Career Development Award instead supports HFSP’s own fellowship alumni as they establish their first independent position, functioning as a bridge between fellowship and independent group leadership rather than either of the other two mechanisms.
How competitive is HFSP funding?
Very. Only a minority of Letters of Intent for Research Grants are invited to submit a Full Proposal, and only a fraction of those are ultimately funded. Applicants should treat HFSP as a highly selective, prestige-tier international mechanism rather than a routine funding source, and plan accordingly for the time investment a competitive application requires.
This guide reflects HFSP’s program structure and eligibility framework as described on hfsp.org. Award amounts, deadlines, and specific eligibility terms are set and updated by HFSP directly; a research office should always confirm current-cycle details on hfsp.org before advising a PI or submitting an application.
