Fellowship Administration:
Innovating new relevant knowledge

Unrestricted fellowship funding giving researchers the freedom to pursue novel ideas can lead to new knowledge with the potential to address pressing societal challenges. 

Recent research indicates that unrestricted fellowships funding “people, not projects” are more likely to accelerate scientific innovation, relative to restricted research grants. For example, recipients of fellowships awarded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which “tolerates early failure, rewards long-term success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment,” are 96 percent more likely to produce breakthrough research, relative to grantees of the National Institutes of Health, who are “subject to short review cycles, predefined deliverables, and renewal policies unforgiving of failure” (Azoulay et al 2011). Observers have called for increased use of unrestricted fellowships to increase “research autonomy and risk taking” in science (Cowen and Collison 2019, Park et al 2023).

The Social Science Research Council has an extensive history of working with funding partners to design and administer fellowship programs that foster the production of new and relevant knowledge. We craft fellowship goals and selection criteria, design publicity and marketing materials, recruit applications from large domestic and international talent pools, secure leading experts to serve on peer review panels, engage fellow cohorts in mentoring, learning, and community-building activities, and provide efficient and responsive application processing, peer review management, award administration, and outcome reporting.