AXA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025

Research

What?

The AXA Research Fund has launched the call for postdoctoral fellowships. This year's call targets postdoctoral research geared towards rethinking social contracts for the 21st century, demographic change, social protection and solidariy.

Projects supported via this call need to be innovative and transdisciplinary research projects which can focus on:

1. How can the social contract be updated to address the challenges of aging populations, declining birth rates, and shifting dependency ratios, while ensuring intergenerational equity in health, pensions, and social protection systems?
2. What innovative approaches can the social contract adopt to support youth populations in regions experiencing rapid population growth, ensuring access to education, employment, and social mobility?
3. How can the social contract integrate private sector actors to enhance public health systems and address the needs of aging societies, particularly in areas like pandemic response and elderly care?
4. How can the social contract be adapted to integrate migrants and refugees into host societies while addressing concerns about social cohesion and resource allocation?
5. How can the social contract be reviewed to address the impacts of climate-induced migration and displacement on both sending and receiving communities?
6. How can the social contract be updated to address the rise of non-traditional employment models (e.g., gig work, remote work, platform-based labor) while ensuring fair wages, job security, and access to social protections?
7. What role can the social contract play in supporting lifelong learning and reskilling initiatives to help workers adapt to automation, artificial intelligence, and rapidly changing labor markets?

Who?

AXA Fellowships aim at supporting promising early-career researchers, defined as no more than five years past the completion of their PhD on a topic aligned with AXA’s priorities and societal challenges. The support of AXA Research Fund should be transformative for the researcher and the advancement of their field. To apply for a grant, researchers must not have a permanent (tenured or tenure-track) position.

Candidates should be of the highest caliber and have demonstrated outstanding research achievements, as evidenced by the usual indicators for assessing academic excellence such as research outputs (e.g. publications), research activities (e.g. organizing networks, being involved in communities) and research impact (e.g. policy report, specific recognition through awards, etc).

Application?

An AXA Postdoctoral Fellowship is awarded for a period of 2 years. Participating institutions are invited to present only one candidate. For this reason, an internal preselection is part of the process whenever several applications are received. To enable this preselection, we ask interested candidates to express their interest in participating in this call asap by completing this form and sending it to OBI via research@uhasselt.be no later than 22 April 2025 (12 PM = noon)

Candidates will be notified of the selection no later than 30 April after which OBI will inform AXA of the candidate selected by UHasselt.

Regulations?

The AXA grant is awarded for a maximum amount of €140.000 in total, to be spent over 2 years. The candidate must submit a free-standing independent research project involving full-time work for the duration of the fellowship (with the possible exception of up to 20% time dedicated to teaching). It is the applicant’s responsibility to submit a carefully calibrated budget, appropriate for the ambition of the research program and justified in a detailed and coherent manner. Host institutions will be expected to participate in the AXA Fellowship’s general funding with studentships, PhD support and material resources related to the research program. There is no minimum requirement on the institution’s contribution. However, a larger contribution naturally makes the proposal more attractive. The institution’s participation should be detailed in the budget section of the application form. Grants should not substitute for the host institution’s responsibilities vis-à-vis its researchers. As a result, the grant cannot be used to procure basic laboratory equipment.

The budget will help cover:

• Annual salary of the researcher (based on institution internal policy)
• Equipment/resources (databases, survey costs, consumables, etc.), academic activities (conferences,
workshops, fieldwork, etc.)
• Outreach activities (beyond academic audiences). 

Any other type of costs not listed above should be justified in the application template. No overhead costs are eligible. No additional budget will be granted. Budget reallocation during an ongoing project must be strongly justified.

More information?

Deadline intern

22.04.2025, 22.04.2025

Contact Hasselt University?

E-mail brecht.vanhoof@uhasselt.be

Tel. +3211268744