Postdoc Funding and Fellowships

The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs has collated a list of internal and external funding opportunities as well as funds to support postdoc travel to conferences, and seed funding mechanisms across the university designed to fund early-stage research.

Below is specific information about funding information, requirements, eligibility, and application deadlines.

OPA-managed Fellowship Opportunities

Ohio State President’s Postdoctoral Scholars Program (PPSP)

About the Program

The President’s Postdoctoral Scholars Program (PPSP), supported by the Office of the President, was launched in January 2018 to recognize highly qualified postdoctoral trainees who will become leaders in their fields. The program supports the scholarly efforts and training of terminal degree holders (PhD and others), who wish to pursue research and creative inquiry careers in academia, as well as providing professional development and networking opportunities.

Benefits include salary support and full benefits (health insurance, tuition assistance, and paid leave among others) provided by the Office of the President and the scholar’s faculty mentor/sponsor college. PPSP scholars also receive supplementary funds to support research, creative expression, and professional development-related expenses.

Read more about the program, including details about how to apply, eligibility criteria, and required application materials on the PPSP page.

External Postdoc Fellowship and Grant Funding Opportunities

Duke University Extramural Research Funding Database

Duke University

Duke has an excellent extramural research portal that searches across all federal agencies, a majority of private foundation funders, as well as international funding entities.

Grants.gov

Grants.gov

A centralized portal that aggregates all federal agency opportunities in one place. Keyword searches can be saved for easy reference and sent to you via email to keep up to date on the most current funding in your field of study.

Johns Hopkins National Fellowships and Funding List

Johns Hopkins University

JHU maintains a curated guide for available postdoctoral fellowships and other types of grant funding across all research disciplines.

National Postdoc Association

NPA has an online searchable database of opportunities available to postdocs hosted through Johns Hopkins University.

NPA Fellowship List

The NPA also offers a new IMPACT Fellowship Program for postdocs.

Ohio State’s Office of Foundation Relations (OFR)

Office of Foundation Relations (OFR)

The Ohio State University’s Office of Foundation Relations curates a list of private foundations who provide fellowship and other funding opportunities across all scientific disciplines for which postdoctoral scholars and graduate students are eligible.

SPIN

Ohio State has an institutional license to SPIN, a large grant search engine.

The Office of the Vice President for Research provides a campus-wide subscription to SPIN which aggregates over 40,000 funding opportunities from more than 10,000 global sponsors. SPIN provides intuitive and easy access to funding opportunities geared towards both individual and administrative users.

Learn how to use the SPIN funding opportunities database to create personalized email funding alerts by following these instructions.

Step 1: Create your SPIN profile while on campus (OSU Wireless or campus network), step-by-step instructions are available.

Step 2: Watch for an email with login instructions from spinsupport@infoedglobal.com. (Access may take up to one business day; the user-validation process requires an overnight administrative process.)

Step 3: Login to SPIN and create and save searches that generate customized funding alerts.

More information about research funding and support resources can be found on the Office of Research website.

Some simple search suggestions when using SPIN:

Place quotation marks around a key phrases within your research topic/discipline, e.g., “breast cancer”
Use “AND” to search for multiple words, e.g., psychology and adolescent will return results with both terms in the record
Use “NOT” to exclude terms, e.g., STEM not “stem cell*” will return results with only STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)
Use ~ before any word to search throughout a funding opportunity record, e.g., ~cancer – will search all sections of the funding record not just the abstract

Travel Awards

Conference and Travel Funding

Do you plan on attending a conference or training workshop? Do you need external funding to help cover travel costs? Are you an international scholar? Consider the following:

Consider the following:

Does the conference or training you plan to attend offer travel awards?
Does your college have staff professional development awards?

College of Arts and Sciences
College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences
The University has Staff Career Development Grants. Applications are accepted twice a year, in January and July.
The Women’s Place has Staff Career Development Grants as well as Staff Manager Development Grants.

3. The Postdoctoral Association (PDA)’s Travel Awards runs a travel award competition for university postdocs each semester. The PDA confers up to 4 of these awards each semester to postdocs who are traveling to scientific conferences, professional development workshops, or other types of career development events. For the timeline and how to apply, please visit their site.

4. Travel information for International Scholars

International scholars have additional processes to consider when traveling to conferences and events. The Office of International Affairs has developed a helpful step-by-step guide that can be found on their website. Additionally, international postdocs can sign up for a 1:1 consultation with an OIA staff member to discuss university-related travel. Sign up for an appointment.

Internal University Funding for Research and Creative Inquiry

Ohio State has many institutes and centers that provide seed funding mechanisms to support early-stage research. Please pay careful attention to the eligibility requirements in the links below as some institutes might restrict postdocs to apply to only a sub-set of the seed funding mechanisms that they offer.

Interdisciplinary centers that offer pilot and seed funds at Ohio State

Below find a list of centers along with the scholarly fields covered by their opportunities.

CBI - Chronic Brain Injury

Traumatic Brain Injury technology, research, and therapeutics

CCC - Comprehensive Cancer Center

Cancer research

CCTS – Center for Clinical and Translational Science

Biomedical, clinical, and translational research

ERIK - Enterprise for Research, Innovation, and Knowledge President’s Research Excellence Program

High risk, high reward, novel and/or strategic interdisciplinary research

FFH - Foods for Health

Food and agricultural science and technology, food-host interactions, nutrition, disease, and analytics, data science, and omics-focused research.