Applications are open for the Research Ireland Industry Fellowship Programme. The programme provides funding for collaborative research projects, codeveloped by researchers and industry partners, and supports researcher placements in industry.
Researchers spend time working in host organisations, helping to address real-world challenges, explore new opportunities and strengthen connections between industry and the research community.
Research Ireland provides up to €130,000 in funding to support eligible fellowship costs associated with researcher placements of between one and 12 months full-time (or up to 24 months part-time), helping organisations access specialist expertise and develop their collaborative research capacity.
The overall aim is to strengthen the linkages and interplay between industry and the research community. “We are looking to strengthen competitiveness through the development of an innovation-led economy with a focus on attracting and retaining FDI and supporting indigenous industries to scale,” says Dr Aisling McEvoy, head of enterprise partnerships at Research Ireland.
READ MORE
“We want to increase the capacity of the economy to use knowledge, and this requires absorptive capacity in firms but also requires institutions to make expertise easier to find, research infrastructure easier to access and relationships easier to sustain,” she adds.
The Industry Fellowship Programme forms part of a broader portfolio of mobility fellowship programmes being developed by Research Ireland to support the movement of researchers across sectors, strengthening collaboration, knowledge exchange and research impact, she explains. This portfolio includes programmes such as the Research Ireland Fellowship and the Public Service Fellowship.
The programme builds on the success of previous enterprise-facing mobility schemes, including the Enterprise Fellowship Placement Stream and the Industry RD&I Fellowship Programme.
“It aims to support researcher mobility to enterprise to strengthen knowledge exchange, collaboration and innovation, and to accelerate the application of research for economic impact across Ireland,” McEvoy explains.
“The fellow is based in a company working on a codeveloped research project that addresses shared challenges and opportunities,” she continues. “By embedding researchers within industry, the programme promotes the exchange of knowledge, skills and expertise between academia and enterprise.”
The programme is open to late-stage PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and academic staff, she adds. These include faculty staff seeking dedicated time to undertake a collaborative project with an eligible industry partner; postdoctoral researchers; and late-stage PhD candidates who will have completed their PhD before the fellowship begins.
Applicants must have the support of both an eligible Irish research body and an eligible industry partner to undertake the proposed fellowship. The research body administers the award and acts as the employer of the fellow throughout the fellowship.
Eligible industry partners are companies, in Ireland or overseas, that can provide an appropriate research environment for an embedded fellow to undertake the proposed project and have the capacity, expertise and resources to support the collaboration.
“Partner companies to date have included large multinationals, SMEs, start-ups and spin outs,” McEvoy notes. “These include large companies whose technical staff might be primarily physicists and engineers, but they are developing or introducing a new product that might need specific skills like polymer chemistry, electrochemistry, nanotechnology to develop the new product.”
There is also an FDI dimension, she says. “The embedding of a fellow can help to develop research capacity and capability in the Irish base of a multinational company which demonstrates the opportunity to do more and can give confidence to the corporate headquarters to invest in R&D in Ireland.”
At the other end of the spectrum the programme can be very useful for SMEs and start-ups who can’t afford to recruit a PhD qualified researcher. “The expertise of the researcher can unlock innovation in the business helping them to grow and scale.”
In an example of a successful fellowship funded by Research Ireland Dr Ayse Kont, a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork (UCC), worked with Boston Scientific Cork to work on medical device polymer bead process optimisation.
Looking back on the fellowship, she said: “Transitioning to industrial research during the fellowship seemed like learning a new language or putting on a new pair of glasses – you understand, see and gain access to a new world. It truly widened my perspective and enabled me to grow professionally. Beyond professional growth, it also helped me to identify and pinpoint the environment and area I want to continue working.”
“This project deepened our understanding of the existing product, opening possibilities for expanded applications and new features. The methodologies and concepts developed during this work are also transferable, offering a framework for handling newly acquired products within the same space at Boston Scientific,” said Gareth Bell, senior fellow manufacturing engineer at Boston Scientific.
There is no specific closing date for applications, McEvoy says. “Applications can be submitted at any time, but batches of applications will be assessed in November 2026, March 2027 and September 2027.”
