The National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF) is a department within Singapore’s Prime Minister’s Office — not a ministry, and not a research-performing institute — that sets national direction for research, innovation and enterprise (RIE) and funds the strategic programmes that cut across individual ministries and statutory boards. For a research administrator or investigator working with Singapore-based collaborators, NRF is the counterpart to bodies like UKRI, France’s ANR, or the Netherlands’ NWO: it does not fund every research dollar in the country, but it sets the national RIE plan and administers the fellowship, investigator, and large-programme funding that sits above what individual universities, A*STAR, and sector ministries fund on their own.
This guide is the orientation page for NRF specifically — its mission, governance, position within the wider Singapore government, and how its funding pillars fit into the national RIE plan cycle. It deliberately stays at the agency-overview level rather than re-covering individual schemes in full (CASRAI’s A*STAR International Fellowship guide covers one adjacent Singapore scheme in depth); where a specific NRF instrument has its own dedicated page, it is linked rather than repeated here.
What NRF Is
NRF was established on 1 January 2006 as a department within the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). Its stated mission is to “build a dynamic Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) ecosystem that advances Singapore’s competitiveness and drives societal and economic impact for Singapore and the world,” with a vision of developing Singapore “as a vibrant science and technology hub, with R&D contributing significantly to a knowledge-intensive, innovation and entrepreneurial economy.”
NRF’s functions, per its own description, span: setting national direction for R&D through policy formulation and strategic planning; funding strategic research initiatives through a portfolio of competitive programmes; developing research talent through fellowship and investigatorship schemes; and overseeing cross-institutional programmes such as Corporate Laboratories and CREATE (below). Placing NRF inside the PMO, rather than under a line ministry, is itself a structural signal: it positions national research strategy as a whole-of-government function that sits above — and coordinates — the research funding and performance done separately by individual ministries and statutory boards, rather than as one more sector-specific funder alongside them.
NRF is a comparatively young institution relative to Singapore’s wider science and technology apparatus. Its lineage traces back to the National Science and Technology Board (NSTB), established in 1991 under the National Science and Technology Board Act to replace the earlier Science Council of Singapore; NSTB was reorganized and renamed the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in January 2002. NRF was created afresh in 2006 as a distinct PMO department to take on the national-policy and strategic-funding role, separate from A*STAR’s operational, research-institute-based role — see “How NRF Fits Into Singapore’s Broader Research Funding Landscape” below for how that division of labor works today.
Governance and Structure
NRF is governed by the National Research Foundation Board. As of this writing, the Board is chaired by Mr Heng Swee Keat. The Board’s membership is split between ministerial and non-ministerial members: ten ministerial members holding portfolios that include National Development, Sustainability and the Environment, Education, Health, Finance, Transport, Manpower, Digital Development, Social and Family Development, and Defence; and nineteen non-ministerial members, including Permanent Secretaries from key ministries, the heads of major statutory boards (including A*STAR’s Chairman — cross-representation that is itself part of how NRF and A*STAR stay coordinated), the presidents of Singapore’s two largest universities (NUS and NTU), and private-sector leaders drawn from companies such as DBS, Temasek, PSA International, and Sembcorp.
A separate RIE Strategy Committee, chaired by the Head of Civil Service, coordinates RIE strategy at the whole-of-government level feeding into NRF Board decisions — the mechanism by which NRF’s national plans get buy-in from, and stay aligned with, the ministries and statutory boards that will actually implement pieces of each RIE plan.
Singapore’s RIE Plan Cycle: How NRF Funding Is Set
NRF does not set its funding budget year to year the way many single-programme funders do. Since Innovation and Enterprise was added to Singapore’s national science and technology planning framework around 2010, national R&D funding has been set through successive five-year Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) plans, each running at roughly 1% of GDP and each formulated by NRF with the RIE Strategy Committee before Cabinet approval.
The most recent completed cycle, RIE2025 (2021–2025), committed S$25 billion around three goals: addressing national needs and driving economic growth across four priority domains (manufacturing, trade and connectivity; human health and potential; urban solutions and sustainability; and smart nation and digital economy); enriching the scientific base by sustaining basic-research funding at roughly one-third of the overall budget while building research talent; and strengthening support for companies through innovation and enterprise platforms.
RIE2025’s successor, RIE2030, was endorsed by Cabinet in December 2025 and formally announced by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong in his Budget 2026 speech on 12 February 2026, taking effect from April 2026 through 2030. RIE2030 commits S$37 billion — a 32% increase over RIE2025 — allocated as: foundational research (24%), innovation and enterprise (20%), the same four priority domains carried over from RIE2025 (29%, S$10.8 billion combined), “white space” funding for infrastructure and new programmes that emerge after the plan’s launch (17%), and talent development (10%). A new feature of RIE2030 is S$3 billion set aside for two RIE Flagships and two RIE Grand Challenges — large, national, translational research programmes distinct from NRF’s standing competitive schemes. The first announced Flagship targets semiconductors, led jointly by A*STAR and the Economic Development Board (EDB); the first Grand Challenge targets active ageing. RIE2030 also commits to further strengthening Singapore’s AI, data, and compute capabilities across the plan.
For a research administrator, the practical takeaway is that individual NRF grant schemes (below) are implementing mechanisms under whichever RIE plan is currently in force, not standalone programmes with independent multi-year budgets — a scheme’s available funding, priority areas, and even continuation can shift at each RIE plan boundary.
NRF’s Major Funding Pillars
NRF administers its funding through several standing schemes and programmes, in addition to whatever Flagships/Grand Challenges are current under the active RIE plan. At the agency-overview level, the main pillars are:
- NRF Fellowship — provides early-career researchers the opportunity to lead independent research in Singapore over a five-year period. It is open to all fields of science and technology and to researchers of any nationality; appointees take up tenure-track faculty positions at one of eight host institutions (A*STAR, NUS, NTU, Duke-NUS, SMU, SUTD, TLL, or SIT). This is a separate, larger tracked backlog topic in its own right (see CASRAI’s dedicated NRF Fellowship coverage) and is only summarized here.
- NRF Investigatorship — funds a small number of established Principal Investigators with a strong track record to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk research.
- Competitive Research Programme (CRP) — funds multi-disciplinary teams conducting cutting-edge research projects relevant to Singapore, rather than single-investigator projects.
- Central Gap Fund (CGF) — supports translating research outcomes into products, processes, or services with real economic or societal benefit for Singapore — NRF’s proof-of-concept/commercialization bridge between research output and deployment.
- Corporate Laboratories (Corp Labs) — encourages public-private R&D partnerships by embedding company-funded labs within universities or research institutes, pairing a research performer with an industry partner under one roof.
- CREATE (Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise) — an international collaboratory hosting research centres set up by nine partner universities and research organizations (ETH Zurich, MIT, Technical University of Munich, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, UC Berkeley, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Cambridge University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and France’s CNRS), organized across four thematic areas — human, energy, environmental, and urban systems — with each centre collaborating directly with Singapore-based investigators.
- Integrated Grant Management System (IGMS) — the online portal through which researchers and institutions apply for and administer NRF-funded (and several other agencies’) grants, functionally comparable to Research.gov or Grants.gov in the US system.
How NRF Fits Into Singapore’s Broader Research Funding Landscape
NRF is often the first agency a non-Singapore-based collaborator encounters, but it is not the only, or even the largest, funder of research activity in Singapore. Three relationships matter most for a research administrator scoping a Singapore partnership:
- A*STAR is a statutory board under the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) — not under NRF or the PMO. Where NRF sets national RIE strategy and funds cross-cutting/strategic programmes, A*STAR is itself a research performer and funder: it operates its own network of research institutes across biomedical sciences and science and engineering, runs its own scholarship programmes, and houses a commercialization arm. The two agencies are structurally distinct but operationally linked — A*STAR’s Chairman sits on the NRF Board, several NRF schemes (including the NRF Fellowship) list A*STAR as an eligible host institution, and A*STAR co-leads specific RIE-funded initiatives, such as RIE2030’s semiconductors Flagship (jointly with EDB).
- The Ministry of Education (MOE) funds Singapore’s universities’ own academic, curiosity-driven research through a separate competitive mechanism, the Academic Research Fund (AcRF), organized in tiers (Tier 1 through Tier 3) and administered by the individual universities on MOE’s behalf. AcRF funding is distinct from, and runs alongside, NRF’s schemes: a principal investigator at NUS or NTU may hold an MOE AcRF grant and an NRF Investigatorship or CRP award concurrently, since they fund different categories of activity through different competitive processes.
- Other sector ministries and statutory boards — the Ministry of Health, the National Environment Agency, and others — also fund research within their own remits, and EDB partners with NRF and A*STAR on the more industry-facing elements of RIE Flagships. NRF’s distinguishing role in this landscape is that it operates at the PMO/whole-of-government level: it sets the national RIE plan’s budget quantum and priority domains, and it directly funds the programmes — Flagships, Grand Challenges, CRP, Corp Labs, CREATE, the Central Gap Fund — that are explicitly designed to work across institutions and ministries rather than within just one of them.
In practice, this means a Singapore research collaboration can involve NRF funding, A*STAR funding, MOE funding, or some combination, depending on whether the work is strategic/cross-cutting (more likely NRF), applied/institute-based (more likely A*STAR), or university-based basic research (more likely MOE) — and confirming which agency, not just which university, is the actual funder is a standard first step when scoping a Singapore partnership.
Frequently asked questions
What does NRF stand for, and what does it do?
NRF stands for the National Research Foundation, Singapore. It is a department within Singapore’s Prime Minister’s Office that sets national research, innovation and enterprise (RIE) strategy and administers a portfolio of competitive research-funding schemes, rather than a ministry or a single research institute.
Is NRF a ministry?
No. NRF is a department within the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), not a standalone ministry. It was established on 1 January 2006.
What is the difference between NRF and A*STAR?
NRF sets national RIE policy and strategic funding at the PMO/whole-of-government level. A*STAR is a statutory board under the Ministry of Trade and Industry that performs and funds its own research through a network of institutes, distinct from NRF’s national-coordination role. A*STAR’s lineage traces to the National Science and Technology Board (est. 1991, renamed A*STAR in 2002); NRF was created separately in 2006. The two are operationally linked — A*STAR’s Chairman sits on the NRF Board, and A*STAR co-leads some NRF/RIE-funded programmes.
What is RIE2030?
RIE2030 is Singapore’s current five-year national Research, Innovation and Enterprise plan, covering April 2026 through 2030, with a committed S$37 billion budget — a 32% increase over the preceding RIE2025 plan (2021–2025, S$25 billion). It was endorsed by Cabinet in December 2025 and formally announced by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong in the Budget 2026 speech.
Who funds university research in Singapore if not NRF?
Singapore’s universities also receive research funding directly from the Ministry of Education through its Academic Research Fund (AcRF, Tiers 1–3), which is separate from NRF’s schemes. A single principal investigator can hold funding from both NRF and MOE at the same time, since the two fund different categories of research activity through different competitions.
What is the NRF Fellowship?
The NRF Fellowship (formally the Singapore NRF Fellowship) funds early-career researchers to lead independent research in Singapore over a five-year period, open to all fields of science and technology and to applicants of any nationality, with appointees taking tenure-track positions at one of eight host institutions. It is a distinct, separately tracked topic from this agency overview — see CASRAI’s dedicated coverage for eligibility and funding detail.
Related CASRAI resources
- Grants Management & Research Funding — the cluster hub for grant mechanisms, compliance, and international funding-body content
- A*STAR International Fellowship — a specific Singapore scheme adjacent to NRF’s own fellowship funding
- JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science): Funding Overview — a comparable national funding-agency overview for another Asia-Pacific research system
- Australian Research Funding: How the ARC, NHMRC, and MRFF Fit Together — another example of a multi-agency national funding landscape
- Canada’s Tri-Agency Research Funding System: CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC
- ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche): France’s Research Funding Agency
- NWO (Dutch Research Council): How Netherlands Research Funding Works
- How to Find a Research Funding Sponsor
