Deadline: 02-Dec-2025
The Microsoft Research Fellowship creates opportunities for academic scholars (faculty, PhD students, and postdocs) to collaborate with Microsoft Research on open research challenges that advance scientific understanding, drive innovation, and deliver societal benefit.
The fellowship’s focus areas encompass a broad spectrum of research themes, including advancing AI for global and societal impact, developing equitable and creative AI tools, and studying the effects of AI on global employment.
It emphasizes grounding AI in diverse languages and cultures, tackling misinformation, and enhancing AI fundamentals such as scalable reasoning, generative model evaluation, retrieval model optimization, and test-time verification.
Other key areas include biological and scientific modeling, clean energy applications, reinforcement learning, and human-AI collaboration. The program also supports exploration in multimodal and embodied intelligence, creativity-driven AI, socially intelligent agents, and robotic foundation models.
The Microsoft Research Fellowship aims to strengthen collaboration between academic researchers and Microsoft Research through interdisciplinary exploration that accelerates innovation, promotes responsible development, and addresses complex global challenges.
Funding amounts for the Microsoft Research Fellowship vary by the region where a fellow’s institution is located. Fellows from Africa, Australia & New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico will receive $17,000 USD, while those from Europe will receive $27,000 USD, and fellows from Canada and the United States will receive $47,000 USD.
These stipends include travel funding to support in-person collaboration, enabling fellows to visit Microsoft Research principal investigators and collaborators at Microsoft Research labs or offices.
All payments will be distributed in March or April 2026, with Microsoft coordinating the transfer of funds through respective departmental finance liaisons. Stipend rates are reviewed annually and benchmarked against comparable fellowship programs in each geography to ensure competitive alignment.
This program invites scholars from academia who are pursuing research and instruction across a range of disciplines, offering an opportunity to engage in meaningful research partnerships.
Eligible regions include Africa, Australia & New Zealand, Canada, Europe, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States.
The fellowship is open to PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty members, with eligibility varying by research challenge. PhD students must be actively pursuing their degree at an accredited institution, while postdocs and faculty members must be employed or enrolled at degree-granting universities within eligible regions.
Faculty members must hold a terminal degree and include a student collaborator in their proposals. Each category requires the submission of a Statement of Interest outlining motivation, alignment with research challenges, qualifications, and potential collaborative impact with Microsoft researchers.
The funds are transferred as unrestricted gifts to the fellows’ institutions and disbursed according to university policies. All fellowship payments will be distributed in March or April 2026.
Proposals must be submitted through the online submission portal by Tuesday, December 2, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET, with notifications expected by Tuesday, February 10, 2026.
For more information, visit Microsoft.
