IBSA Foundation Fellowships — Call 2026: Seven €32,000 Awards for Researchers Under 40 in Dermatology, Endocrinology, Fertility and Urology, Orthopaedics and Pain Medicine, and Healthy Ageing, Plus a €5,000 Research Equity Prize

IBSA Foundation Fellowships — Call 2026: Seven €32,000 Awards for Researchers Under 40 in Dermatology, Endocrinology, Fertility and Urology, Orthopaedics and Pain Medicine, and Healthy Ageing, Plus a €5,000 Research Equity Prize

The IBSA Foundation for scientific research, based in Lugano, Switzerland, has opened its 2026 fellowship call. Seven awards of €32,000 each are on offer, and applications close on 31 January 2027. The money is designed to do one specific thing: pay a young researcher’s cost of living for twelve months so that they can carry out a defined project in a host laboratory. Alongside the seven fellowships sits a separate €5,000 Research Equity Prize for the strongest project based at an institution in a developing country.

This is a compact, tightly scoped programme rather than a large infrastructure grant, and that shapes everything about how you should approach it. The Foundation is not funding a laboratory; it is funding a person and a year of their work. The application is correspondingly short — a CV, one to three publications, and a cover letter — which means the selection panel forms its view of you very quickly from a small amount of evidence.

Key Details

What the €32,000 Covers — and What It Does Not

The Foundation is unusually explicit about the boundaries of the award, and reading those boundaries carefully will save you from a misdirected application.

The fellowship amount, stated before taxes and duties, is intended to cover salary and mobility costs — in other words, the cost of living for the twelve months of the project. That framing matters. It is a stipend-style award attached to a person.

What is explicitly not covered: bench fees, overheads, funds for consumables, and any other financial benefit to the host supervisor or the receiving institute. If your project needs €18,000 of reagents, sequencing, or animal costs, that money has to come from somewhere else. The host laboratory must already be resourced to run the work; the IBSA fellowship pays for you to be the person running it.

One helpful detail: the fellowship can be combined with other awards to increase the salary. It is not structured as an exclusive appointment that forbids topping up. If you hold a partial stipend and this award would complete it, that is a workable arrangement rather than a disqualifying one.

The salary rate depends on the country being visited and may be subject to taxation. The Foundation states plainly that it cannot advise on national tax regulations and recommends that winners contact the competent authorities in the host country. Build that into your planning: €32,000 gross in Switzerland, Brazil, or India resolves to very different net figures and very different purchasing power.

The Five Research Fields

The call is restricted to five areas, and a project outside them is simply out of scope:

• Dermatology
• Endocrinology
• Fertility and Urology
• Orthopaedics and Pain Medicine
• Healthy Ageing

Note that there are seven fellowships and five fields. The published call page does not commit to a fixed number of awards per field, so it is reasonable to assume the Scientific Board allocates across the five areas based on the quality of what arrives rather than by a rigid quota. Do not try to game which field looks least competitive — you cannot see the applicant pool, and a project stretched to fit a field it does not belong in reads badly.

These fields align with the therapeutic interests of the wider IBSA Group, the pharmaceutical company behind the Foundation. That is worth understanding as context, not as a constraint: the call is open to non-economic academic biomedical research, and the evaluation criteria published by the Foundation are scientific rather than commercial. But if your work sits squarely inside one of these five areas, you are in the right room.

The €5,000 Research Equity Prize

This is a genuinely distinctive part of the 2026 call. A €5,000 award goes to the best scientific project carried out in a laboratory, research institute, or university based in a developing country. The Foundation frames it as promoting equity of access to research and recognising scientific excellence in resource-limited settings.

The eligible country list follows the United Nations classification and covers Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia excluding Israel, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and Oceania excluding Australia and New Zealand.

Two practical points. First, the eligibility criteria for the Research Equity Prize are the same as for the fellowships — same age limit, same degree requirements, same host-institution rule. You are not filling in a separate form for a separate scheme. Second, the prize is paid in a single instalment before the start of the project, unlike the fellowship itself, which is split. If you are at an eligible institution, that front-loaded payment can make a material difference to how you sequence the first months of work.

Who Can Apply

The eligibility rules are short and enforced literally.

• Any nationality. There is no restriction on where you come from.
• Under 40 years old on the submission deadline. The reference date is the deadline, not the project start. If you turn 40 on 30 January 2027, check the call document carefully before assuming anything.
• A degree in medicine, biology, pharmacy, biotechnology or bioengineering. This is a closed list on the published call page.
• Career stage: PhD students, PhD holders, post-docs, and medical residents are all eligible.
• Permanent positions such as professorships cannot apply. The scheme is aimed at researchers who have not yet reached a secure academic post.
• Host institution requirement: for the entire duration of the grant, you must be active at a host institution — a research organisation such as a university, hospital, or research centre, whether public or private in legal status — whose primary goal is to conduct non-economic biomedical research independently and disseminate its results.

That last clause is the one most likely to trip people up. A commercial R&D laboratory whose primary purpose is developing proprietary products does not fit the definition, regardless of the quality of the science. A university hospital department does.

How to Apply

Applications are accepted only through the online application system. There is no email or postal route, and supporting documentation sent by any other channel will not be considered.

You must upload three items as separate files:

1. Curriculum Vitae.
2. A list of your best peer-reviewed scientific publications — a minimum of one and a maximum of three.
3. A cover letter containing a short self-presentation.

The proposal itself is submitted through the platform alongside these documents. Give yourself time with the portal: registration, field-by-field data entry, and file upload always take longer than the fifteen minutes people budget for them, and a deadline is a deadline.

The publication list deserves more thought than it usually gets. You are being asked to choose a maximum of three papers, which means the choice itself is a signal. Pick the papers that demonstrate you can carry a piece of work to completion in a relevant area — not simply the three with the highest journal impact factors, and not three papers where you are the eleventh author. If you have one strong first-author paper and two mid-list collaborations, listing the strong one alone may read better than padding.

How Proposals Are Judged

The Foundation publishes its evaluation criteria, and they map cleanly onto three questions:

1. Quality of the project to be developed in the host laboratory — assessed on feasibility, originality, and scientific value.
2. The CV of the candidate, with particular emphasis on research experience.
3. Appropriateness of the host laboratory for the proposed research.

Proposals are evaluated by the Foundation’s Scientific Board through a peer review process, and the Board makes the final decision. Award decisions are final.

There is one explicit bonus signal in the published criteria that is easy to miss and worth acting on: applicants who wish to enhance their scientific profile by working at a research institution different from their laboratory of origin receive a note of merit from the Scientific Board. Mobility is rewarded. If you are choosing between staying in your current group and moving to a lab that offers a technique or a cohort you cannot access at home, the second option is the one this scheme is built to encourage — and it is consistent with the fact that the award explicitly funds mobility costs.

The third criterion — appropriateness of the host laboratory — is where many applications are thinner than they should be. Do not just name the lab. Say what specifically it gives your project: the imaging platform, the patient registry, the animal model, the statistical expertise, the supervisor’s track record on exactly this question. Reviewers who work in these fields will know whether the match is real.

Timeline, Payment, and Obligations

Deadline: 31 January 2027.

Decision: applicants are informed as soon as a decision is reached, normally within three months of the deadline — so realistically by late April or early May 2027.

Acceptance letter: the award is only assigned after you present an acceptance letter from the host institution, which must reach the IBSA Foundation within one week of the communication of the result. This is a tight window. Speak to your host institution’s administration in advance so that a letter can be produced quickly rather than sitting in a signature queue.

Awards ceremony: spring 2027, with the exact date, venue, and format confirmed when results are announced.

Payment: the fellowship is paid in two instalments directly to the bank account (IBAN) you provide. Fifty percent is paid before the project starts, and the remaining fifty percent by the end of 2027. Written confirmation of the start date by the host supervisor is mandatory. The Research Equity Prize, by contrast, is paid in a single instalment before the project begins.

Start date: projects must start in 2027, and fellowship holders cannot move the beginning of the fellowship to the following year. If you know you will not be free to start until 2028, this is not your cycle.

Ongoing obligations: publications arising from the funded research must acknowledge the Foundation, and the acknowledgement should read “IBSA Foundation for scientific research.” Any publication, press release, or other communication citing results from the fellowship must carry the same acknowledgement. Winners are also required each year to reply to a survey mailed by the Foundation — the reply is mandatory — and to promptly notify the Foundation of any change to their email and phone details.

Preparing a Competitive Application

Design a project that genuinely fits twelve months. Feasibility is a named criterion. A proposal that describes three years of work compressed into a one-year budget invites the reviewer to conclude you have misjudged the scope. Define an endpoint you can actually reach and state what the deliverable is.

Solve the consumables problem before you apply, and say so. Because bench fees and consumables are excluded, a reviewer’s natural question is: how will this work actually be paid for? An application that notes the host laboratory has existing funding, equipment, or an established cohort covering the experimental costs closes that gap. An application that ignores it leaves the reviewer to assume the worst.

Use mobility deliberately. Given the published note of merit for moving to a new institution, if you are moving, make it visible and explain the scientific reason for the move — the specific capability you are going to acquire or use.

Write the cover letter as a self-presentation, not a summary. The call asks for a short self-presentation. That is an invitation to explain your trajectory: what you have done, why this project follows from it, and where it takes you. A cover letter that only restates the abstract wastes the one document where your voice appears.

Check the age and position rules against yourself honestly. Under 40 on the deadline, no permanent professorship. These are binary.

Common Mistakes

• Applying with a project outside the five fields. There is no discretionary category.
• Assuming the €32,000 will cover experiments. It will not. It covers your living costs and mobility.
• Submitting documents in a single merged PDF. The call specifies separate files for the CV, the publication list, and the cover letter.
• Listing more than three publications. The cap is three; exceeding it signals you did not read the instructions.
• Leaving the host acceptance letter to chance. One week from notification is not long enough to start a conversation from scratch.
• Planning a 2028 start. Deferral is explicitly not permitted.
• Treating the Research Equity Prize as a separate application. It runs within the same call for applicants at institutions in eligible countries.
• Ignoring taxation. The gross figure is not the net figure, and the Foundation will not advise you on this.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I hold this alongside another fellowship or salary? The Foundation states the fellowship can be added to other awards to increase the salary. Confirm the compatibility rules of your other funder as well.

Do I need to be in Switzerland or Europe? No. Applicants of any nationality may apply, and the host institution requirement is about the nature of the organisation, not its country.

Are medical residents eligible? Yes — PhD students, PhD holders, post-docs, and residents are all named as eligible.

Is there a separate form for the €5,000 Research Equity Prize? The prize is described as part of the IBSA Foundation Fellowships and shares the same eligibility requirements. Check the downloadable Call 2026 document for any additional declaration required of applicants based in eligible countries.

When will I know the outcome? Normally within three months of the 31 January 2027 deadline.

Can I appeal a decision? No. The Foundation states that award decisions are final.

Official Links and Contact

• Call 2026 fellowship page: https://www.ibsafoundation.org/en/fellowship/call-2026 — includes the downloadable Call 2026 document and the FAQ section.
• Application platform: https://ibsafoundation.poliresearch.com/
• IBSA Foundation for scientific research, Strada di Gandria 4, 6976 Castagnola-Lugano, Switzerland
• Phone: +41 58 360 10 00
• Email: [email protected]

Before you write anything, download the Call 2026 document from the official page and read it against your own circumstances. The web page summarises the scheme well, but the call document is the governing text on edge cases — precise age calculation, host institution definitions, and any field-specific notes. Where this guide and the official documentation disagree, the official documentation is correct.