Application for 2025/26 is closed. Please register here or send an e-mail to cfls.call-subscribe(at)wiko-berlin.de to receive the upcoming call for the academic year 2026/27.
The College for Life Sciences is a unique program of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study, to promote excellent early-career postdoctoral researchers in the life sciences and medicine.
The fellowship will offer you time away from your regular lab work, teaching duties, and competitions for funds and positions and take you into a community of peers from other life science areas, leading scientists from various research disciplines, and outstanding intellectuals. This inspiring and interdisciplinary environment can broaden your horizon, help you reconsider and define your research goals, encourage you to follow up daring and unusual ideas, and help you to develop new scientific interactions.
As we do not provide lab space, it is not “just another fellowship”, but the opportunity to step back from your lab routines and reflect on your institutional and intellectual “settings”.
If you are a bright junior scientist at a starting or turning point in your career and are interested in the program, explore how to apply.
The Program at a Glance
- time to think about and work on your own research (develop grants; write articles, reviews, your habilitation, books; develop new research cooperation)
- scientific input from leading scientists from different disciplines
- exchange with peers from other life science areas
- weekly colloquia on cutting-edge science
- career mentoring
- workshops on relevant topics
- fast award procedure (application in November, award in February, start in September)
- flexible and short duration (3-5 month)
- integration in the international and interdisciplinary research community of the Wissenschaftskolleg
- interaction with the excellent scientific community of Berlin, consisting of 4 universities, 5 Max Planck Institutes, 13 Leibniz Institutes, 3 Helmholtz Institutes, and 7 Fraunhofer Institutes
- clinicians may profit from contacts to the Charité, the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine, and/or the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology to gain insights into state-of-the-art medical care, high-throughput omics technologies, and the development of individualized diagnostic techniques to achieve a personalized medicine