PUBLIC EVENT
The UK Intelligence Community (IC) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships scheme is designed to promote unclassified basic research in areas of interest to the intelligence, security, and defence communities.
The scheme offers up to £250,000 over two years to early‑career researchers from all branches of science and engineering with up to five years of postdoctoral experience. Applicants must be citizens of Andorra, Australia, Canada, the EEA, Monaco, New Zealand, San Marino, Switzerland, the UK, the US, or Vatican City.
This year, the scheme has 36 research topics available.
This webinar will introduce the fellowship scheme, provide tips and advice for strengthening your application, and include insights from a current awardee. A Q&A session will follow.
The session is relevant not only for potential fellowship applicants, but also for staff in Research Support Offices at potential UK host institutions who wish to better understand the scheme.
The webinar will outline the aims of the fellowship and provide practical guidance on eligibility, assessment criteria, access mentoring support and strategies for submitting a competitive application. Attendees will also hear about the wider benefits offered beyond direct funding, including:
• reduced teaching and administrative duties to enable greater research focus
• mentorship from Academy Fellows and IC advisors
• access to training and networking opportunities
• membership of the Academy’s Awardee Excellence Community
A current awardee will also share their experience and offer further advice.
To ensure that your queries are addressed during the webinar, we encourage you to submit questions in advance through the registration form. Your questions will be shared anonymously during the Q&A session.
We are committed to fostering diversity in engineering. We are offering pre-application support to groups persistently underrepresented within UK engineering. Check the eligibility criteria and apply here. Deadline is 31 March 2026.
Programme*
| 1.00pm | Welcome |
| 1.05pm |
Overview of the scheme - Dr Andrew Powell OBE, Office of the Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security
|
| 1.25pm | Insights from a current awardee Stefan Sarkadi, Associate Professor of AI in Defence and Security, University of Lincoln |
| 1.40pm | Q&A |
| 2.00pm | End |
*Programme is subject to change
Recording notice
Please note this event will not be recorded.
Accessibility
It is very important to the Royal Academy of Engineering that our events are accessible to all. If you have any accessibility requirements, please contact Claudia Allori at your earliest convenience so that necessary arrangements can be made. Contact details: [email protected].
Diversity monitoring form
The Academy is committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and one of our goals is to develop an engineering community fit for the future. To help us achieve this, we would like to collect some basic anonymous data about the event attendees. If you would like to help, please complete the diversity monitoring form by logging into your user account on our website and completing ‘Update my D&I data’
Stefan Sarkadi
Stefan Sarkadi’s background is multidisciplinary, built on a PhD in computer science from King's College London, a master's in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh, and a bachelor's in philosophy from the West University of Timisoara.
Deception is becoming an increasingly complex socio-cognitive phenomenon that is difficult to detect and reason about. Stefan's research tackles the integration of techniques from AI and deception analysis to generate narratives about multi-agent interactions in complex systems in order to help intelligence analysts perform inference to the best explanation. As an inherently curious individual and a highly interdisciplinary researcher, Stefan aims to understand the complex reasoning and behaviour of intelligent agents (humans or machines) inside social environments like hybrid societies. where humans, machines, and everything in-between interact. Apart from deception, Stefan is also interested in self-explainable AI agents with Theory-of-Mind, reflective AI, self-organising societies, and in the ability of AI agents to build their own stories and narratives