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Cornell Postdoctoral Fellowship Programs

In addition to the many postdocs positions available on Campus, Cornell offers endowed postdoc programs.


KIC Postdoctoral Fellowships

KIC POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS are high-profile, two to three year postdoctoral positions with significant independence and resources. The KIC Fellows program is designed to attract the best and brightest young researchers in nanoscale science to Cornell, and previous KIC Fellows have gone on to professorships at major universities around the world. Fellows will work in partnership with Cornell faculty sponsors on projects consistent with the KIC mission. Funds for expendables and travel will be available.

Applications will be judged on the qualifications of the candidate, the quality and originality of the proposed research, and its suitability to the KIC mission. Approximately three fellowships will be awarded per year. All Fellows agree to put the KIC byline on all publications and presentations during their appointment.

KIC Fellows will also receive lifetime membership in the Society of Cornell Fellows, along with the participants in other named prestigious and competitively awarded Cornell postdoctoral fellowships. 

KIC Postdoctoral Fellowship Website

Questions? Email kicnano@cornell.edu or call 607-255-5580.


Bethe/KIC Postdoctoral Fellowship

Cornell University’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics is soliciting applications for the Bethe/KIC Postdoctoral Fellowship. This prize fellowship will provide an outstanding theoretical physicist the opportunity to work with theorists and experimentalists in Cornell’s physics department. Our group has broad interests in hard and solid condensed matter physics, including: cold atom physics, biophysics, statistical physics, hydrodynamics, electronic structure theory, materials science, strongly correlated electrons, nanoscience, computational physics, and superconductivity. We also have growing efforts incorporating machine learning into studies of condensed matter physics.

We actively encourage applications from diverse and historically underrepresented candidates.

Bethe/KiC postdoctoral fellowship website


Mong Fellowships

The Mong Fellows program will nurture the next generation of scientists and projects at the interface between technology and studies of the function and dysfunction of the brain.

Funding will be provided to exceptionally talented postdoctoral fellows (Mong Senior Fellows) or graduate students (Mong Junior Fellows) pursuing risky, highly creative, projects focused on the development and application of novel technologies for understanding neural function. Appropriate proposals will involve work at early stages, when traditional funding mechanisms are inadequate. The projects, if successfully demonstrated, should have significant potential for future external funding of their continued development and application. Two fellows from different collaborating laboratories must be sponsored by a faculty team. One of the laboratories could be at Weill Cornell Medical School. Successful applications will be awarded up to half time support for each of the two fellows. The Fellows will have the opportunity to engage in work at the forefront of studies of the brain with mentorship by teams that might include engineers, physicists, chemists, computational scientists, and biologists. Funding for project equipment and materials must be available in the laboratories.

For additional information, visit the Mong Fellowships Program page.


Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships

The Society for the Humanities will sponsor two postdoctoral teaching-research fellowships in the humanities, each awarded for a two-year period beginning in July. While in residence at Cornell, Mellon Fellows hold department affiliations and have limited teaching duties and the opportunity for scholarly work. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships are available in two areas of specialization each year.

For additional information, visit the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships page.


Atkinson Postdoctoral Fellowships in Sustainability

The Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future seeks outstanding, creative, and highly-motivated individuals to work with Cornell faculty in collaboration with external partners to discover and implement sustainable solutions to world needs. The center connects nonprofit, government, and industry partners with the research capacity at Cornell in order to jointly develop and test evidence-based solutions. Current collaborators include CARE, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, Avangrid, OXFAM, and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

The center’s emerging strategic plan focuses resources on programs and projects with the overarching theme of building resilient rural-urban systems – including the food, water, energy, and economic systems – that connect the lives of rural- and city-dwellers.

  • Increasing Food Security: Improving the systems of agriculture, aquaculture, and wild food harvest to meet the nutritional needs of all people while enhancing the quality of life of those who produce the food – and the land and aquatic biodiversity and ecosystems on which they depend.
  • Reducing Climate Risks: Innovating technology, financial instruments, and policy to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations and adapt infrastructure, agriculture, and health systems to equitably protect human health, safety, and prosperity from the impact of increasingly catastrophic droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires.
  • Accelerating Energy Transitions: Connecting research with for-profit corporations, non-profit organizations, and government to enhance the generation, distribution, and storage of clean energy for heating and cooling, electricity, and transportation.
  • Achieving One Health: Incorporating our understanding of the inextricable dependence of human health and happiness on the health of nature into the development of agriculture and infrastructure systems.

More information is available on the Atkinson website.


Runway Postdoctoral Program

The Runway Postdoctoral Program at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute is an innovative one-year program for recent Ph.D.s interested in technology entrepreneurship to apply their research and launch new ventures. “Runway” postdocs are provided with significant resources from the Jacobs Institute to transform a new technological idea or a novel combination of existing technologies into a viable product.

For additional information, visit the Runway Postdoctoral Program page.


Cornell Energy Systems Institute (CESI)

The CESI Postdoctoral Fellows is designed to attract the best and brightest young researchers in energy science, engineering, and materials to Cornell. The goal is to create a cohort of independent scholars pursuing frontier research in energy. Fellows will work in partnership with Cornell faculty sponsors on projects consistent with the CESI mission. 

The mission of the Cornell Energy Systems Institute (CESI) is to “Make smart energy systems with low carbon footprint the norm through innovations in materials, technology, and systems design.” In pursuit of this mission, the Institute supports an ambitious agenda spanning discovery research to technology translation and systems integration. The goal is to catalyze the frontier research on materials, devices, data analytics and algorithms, and intelligent systems architectures required to lower cost, improve performance, and reduce the carbon footprint of energy systems. The Institute also serves as a hub for subject matter experts, programs, and multi-user facilities that translate energy-focused research discoveries to prototypes and prototypes to commercial practice.

For more information: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program | Cornell Energy Systems Institute

Questions or concerns can be directed to: energy_cornell@cornell.edu


Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Klarman Fellowships in Cornell University’s College of Arts & Sciences provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. The premier program offers the Fellows independence from constraints of particular grants, enabling the recipients to devote themselves to frontline, innovative research without being tied to specific outcomes or teaching responsibilities.

Recipients may conduct research in any discipline in the College, including the natural, quantitative, and social sciences, humanistic inquiry, and the creative arts as well as emerging, cross-cutting fields that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and hold particular promise for broader impact. The Fellows will be selected from a global pool of applicants based on their research accomplishments, potential for future contributions and alignment of scholarly interests with those of potential faculty mentors in Arts & Sciences. The candidates will also be assessed on how their work can benefit from and contribute to the momentum in strategic research areas in the College.

For additional information and to apply go to the Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships webpage.

CIHMID Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease Postdoctoral Fellows Program

CIHMID invites applications for our postdoctoral training program with appointments to begin Fall 2020. CIHMID postdocs are supported to develop independent and interdisciplinary research programs in collaboration with two or more labs at Cornell. CIHMID postdocs will have intellectual ownership of their projects and may use their support to build bridges across different disciplines of study. 

For additional information go to: CIHMID Postdoctoral Fellows Program

Cornell University Research Excellence Scholars (CURES)

Cornell University Research Excellence Scholars (CURES) are prestigious postdoctoral research positions with significant independence and resources to attract some of the world’s best young scholars to interact deeply with Research Centers within the Research Division on Cornell’s campuses, with an initial pilot with the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR).

Ignite Postdoc for Ventures

The program funds and trains postdocs with entrepreneurial outlooks to start technology ventures. The goal of the program is to build strong new businesses, grow entrepreneur scientists and engineers, advance technology commercialization, and enrich Cornell’s venture ecosystem.

For additional information go to: Postdoc for Ventures – Center For Technology Licensing (cornell.edu)