AXA Research Fund: New Funding Schemes from 2013

The AXA Research Fund will be proposing new funding schemes as of 2013. Three new funding schemes will be created: 

1. AXA Outlooks
2. AXA Awards
3. AXA Joint Research Initiatives

• AXA Outlooks (up to 3 years, 300k€) will help innovative researchers with high potential for popularization on key topics to disseminate their findings; the objective is to reach a wider audience through many possible formats, thus facilitating the dialogue between academic communities, policymakers, decision-makers, experts, and other opinion-formers (journalists, NGOs…).
• AXA Awards (up to 2 years, 250k€) are aimed at supporting mid-career researchers with extremely high potential for innovation in their fields to develop and test their hypotheses, thus accelerating the pace of innovation in risk research areas of greatest concern.
• AXA Joint Research Initiatives (up to 3 years, 300k€) will, under the leadership of a senior academic researcher, offer entry points and a collaborative framework to collaborate with an AXA in-house expert team, providing them with essential elements for the success of their projects (data, field access…); such research will aim to produce research publications in the open literature, available to everyone.

The 3 new schemes will replace previous AXA Project funding scheme. Alongside the new schemes, AXA will continue to fund AXA Chairs and Research Fellowships (Post-Docs), under enhanced procedures. It will now be possible to apply for AXA Chairs throughout the year: applications for 2013 may start as of now. There will only be one award round for AXA Fellowships (Post-Docs) per year, starting in January 2013 (details to be confirmed by the end of November 2012), though the annual number of fellowships (30) and allocated amounts (120k€ over 2 years) will remain the same. Otherwise, the application process for these two funding schemes will remain basically unchanged.

AXA will also cease financing new AXA Doctoral fellowships directly. PhDs can be financed within budgets allocated through AXA funding schemes (except Fellowships).  Current AXA-supported Doctoral students will be financed until the end of the existing awards and will remain part of the AXA Research Fund community.

For more details on each funding scheme, see http://www.axa-research.org/.