PhD Fellowship fundamental research

With the PhD fellowship programme fundamental research, the FWO aims to support early-stage researchers in their development into independent researchers by giving them the opportunity to carry out their own scientifically challenging and innovative research project in view of obtaining a PhD. 

Thanks to the collaboration and support of Meise Botanic Garden, INBO, VITO and the Flanders Hydraulics Research, the FWO can award additional PhD fellowships fundamental research. More information and conditions can be found on the links under the institutions. As part of the ’Kom op tegen Kanker’  campaign, the FWO awards an additional PhD fellowship fundamental research for the top-ranked candidate in the Med4 - Cancer Research panel. 

This year the FWO – Demoucelle Parkinson Charity PhD fellowship can be awarded. This fellowship, funded by the Demoucelle Parkinson Charity, is intended for a promising young researcher with a research proposal in the field of biomedical research on Parkinson’s disease. Applications submitted under the regular calls for Fundamental Research PhD Fellowships (FR) or Strategic Basic Research PhD Fellowships (SB) are eligible for consideration. More information about the application procedures and eligibility conditions is available here. 

• 03 December 2026: opening call

• 01 March 2027 at 5pm CET: closing call (last application date)

• 7 – 25 June 2027: (online) preselection meetings

• 29 June 2027: sending out invitations for interview

• 26 August – 30 September 2027: (physical) interviews

• 07 October 2027: announcement of results

• 01 November 2027: start of fellowship

• 17 November 2027: deadline for sending feedback 

• Duration of the fellowship: 3 years or 4 years 

• Grant amount (0 years seniority): € 2,700 /month (index 2.2080 from 1/09/2026) 

• Bench fee: € 3,720/year 

• You prepare your project in collaboration with a promotor at a Flemish university, the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Leuven or the Faculty of Protestant Theology in Brussels, who is willing to further guide you as a PhD student. 

• You submit your application via the online FWO e-portal and choose the expert panel that will evaluate your application. 

• The FWO informs your promotor (and any co-promotor) of your application and asks your promotor to submit a letter of recommendation. This letter is a mandatory part of the application and will be taken into account as an evaluation criterion. The guidelines and expectations for this letter of recommendation can be found in this document. 

• Specific points of attention FWO application:  

  • Guidelines on form requirements in application forms and accompanying documents of application programmes should be strictly followed.  If these are violated, the application may be declared inadmissible. 

  • Start your application well in advance and do not wait until the last minute. This will give you enough time to respond to any unforeseen circumstances.  

  • The online FWO application form contains a specific tab ‘Research Security’. Applicants are required, based on the topic of their research proposal, involved countries and foreign partners, to complete a set of questions regarding unwanted knowledge transfer, misuse of research results and/or interference. If as a result of this, your project proposal needs a research security approval, please contact the dedicated contact persons at your host institution immediately, preferably before the submission of your proposal. A presentation on this subject can be consulted here. 

  • New: From this call onwards, you will find an additional question in the application form about the ‘substantive and/or conceptual contribution’ that the applicant(s) and possibly others have made to the research design and, where applicable, to the associated data collection and analysis and/or interpretation thereof. This concerns information that allows the evaluators to better understand the genesis of the research proposal. Sometimes questions are raised about the extent to which an applicant for a project or mandate has developed the proposal themselves or has (re)used existing ideas from other proposals. It is also a matter of ethics to acknowledge those who have contributed ideas and data, whether as co-applicants, researchers not involved in the application, or in any other capacity. However, this new section in the forms is not intended as a new criterion for scoring the application. 

• The selected expert panel evaluates your application and, after the preselection meeting, may invite you to the interview. 

• If you are invited for the interviews, you will come to the FWO offices and defend your application before the selected expert panel. 

• The Board of Trustees makes the final decision on the selection based on the advice of the expert panels that evaluated the applications and interviews. You will receive the results via e-mail and you can also find them on the results page once they have been made public. 

You choose a panel of experts to evaluate your application. You choose the panel of experts that covers the research topic of your proposal as best as possible. If your research is multidisciplinary, choose the panel that best matches the discipline to which you are making the greatest scientific contribution. Your choice is important because your chosen panel can always decide that the scope of your application does not fit within their scope. It is therefore best to discuss your choice with your promotor. The FWO is not allowed to give advice on your choice of the panel. 

• Check the list of the panels PhD fellowship fundamental research thoroughly. 

• For the specifically interdisciplinary panel, you should give special attention to the functional definition of interdisciplinarity and why your research meets this definition. You write this motivation in the panel's motivation section. This is important because the panel will also evaluate your application on the interdisciplinarity component (see score grids). 

• The composition of the panels for the new call will be published on the expert panels webpage in mid-May 2027. 

Study narrative: The application form pays attention to a qualitative description of the completed study pathway. In the relevant section, applicants should set out why, based on their study pathway, they would be an excellent candidate to engage in cutting-edge research through their proposed PhD project. Applicants may, for example, refer to study results, awards, diplomas or specific courses. This qualitative approach should allow for a broader assessment of the candidate than merely based on study results or percentiles.

Provide us with your diverse researcher profile: The FWO gives ample consideration to diverse researcher profiles and research output in the application forms. It thereby gives researchers the opportunity to demonstrate the construction of their research careers through a range of scientifically relevant activities, skills, experiences and achievements. This is in line with the international evolution away from a one-sided focus on classical output criteria (such as publications, bibliometrics, patents, etc.) and towards a broader view of what science can be and achieve, while respecting the specificity of each discipline. The application forms are supposed to help the researcher demonstrate that versatility. The FWO instructs the panel members to take this into account in the evaluation of your application.

State any obstacles in your research: We recognise within the FWO any possible impact or event that hampered your research or achievements. We encourage you to indicate such impacts in the application form under the career breaks and motivation statement sections. 

Applicants are encouraged to explicitly highlight how results, in the past or the future, related to Open Science (such as datasets, research software, but also ‘grey literature’ (a.o.) can be mentioned and can contribute to the quality of the proposal. See the CV, the section ‘Research methodology and work plan’, an extra question on the data management plan (DMP), but also elsewhere in the application this topic can be covered. 

More information on the evaluation procedure can be found in the presentation for the info sessions. A separate instructional video on how to complete the application form is available. For questions about the application template or procedure, you can contact your file administrator. 

In the event of technical problems with the e-portal:  FWOhelpdesk@fwo.be