FAQ

Green Future Fellowships are for 10 years in duration and provide awards of up to £3 million.

There are no limitations on the career stage of applicants and applicants are not required to hold a PhD.

Green Future Fellowships can be led by individuals from non-engineering backgrounds or disciplines, but applicants must provide clear evidence of how their research or innovation promotes engineering excellence and supports engineering outcomes.

Applications must be submitted by the applicant via the Academy’s online grant management system.

Applications will be assessed through a two-stage application process:

• Stage one: expression of interest
• Stage two: invited application

For the expression of interest, applicants will be required to provide information about their proposed research or innovation under the following categories:

• Candidate’s motivation and experience
• Innovation and novelty
• Impact on net zero and/or climate resilience
• Routes to success: impact and value
• Long-term vision and sustainability

No details on costings will need to be provided for the expression of interest.

The deadline for expression of interest applications is 5 November 2024, 4pm GMT.

Applications for expression of interest opened on 12 September and closed on 5 November 2024.

Shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit a full application in mid March 2025, with applications due for submission by mid May 2025.

Indicative dates for the next four rounds are listed below. Please note that these are subject to change, and we will update this page with specific dates in due course.

Some example innovation areas that Green Future Fellowships may explore are:

• Generating 24-hour, 365-day a year electricity without burning fossil fuels.
• Reducing the energy usage of vital infrastructure like telecoms networks, data centres and sewage processing.
• Recovering and using energy that would otherwise be wasted – such as the heating of roads in the sun, or heat lost from industrial processes.
• Building electronic memory that uses much less energy.
• Recycling and reusing metals and plastics more efficiently.
• Making future electronic devices without relying on mining of rare and expensive minerals.
• Creating new bacteria that will clean up pollution and waste faster.
• Developing robots to keep our offshore wind turbines running more reliably, whatever the weather.
• Making vehicles lighter so that they use less energy and accelerate faster without costing more.

Applications can be for innovations at all stages of development from basic principles to proof of concept, demonstration and application, with no restrictions based on TRL. Applications must be centred around enabling and driving scalability of the proposed research or innovation. Through the Fellowship, the innovation should advance to the point where scalable real-world impact becomes achievable.

Green Future Fellowships can be held part-time, and applicants are eligible to hold other awards, but applicants must be able to dedicate the majority of their working time to the Green Future Fellowship programme of work.

The Green Future Fellowship should be the applicant’s primary source of employment.

Applicants with multiple sources of employment or those unsure if they meet the criteria should contact the Academy for guidance before applying.

There are no restrictions on the number of applications an organisation can submit.

Yes, unsuccessful applicants will be eligible to re-apply in future rounds of the programme.

Yes, applicants are only precluded from participating as an assessor in the round in which they have applied.

No, the Green Future Fellowship is an individual fellowship awarded to the named applicant, but other people can contribute and be funded through the project. 

This will be determined on a case-by-case basis and is potentially a significant complexity within grant agreements for grants requiring open IP access. However, the Academy will be looking to put in place a minimum possible proportionate setup to ensure our obligations under charity law can be met. The expectation is that for most projects there will be a set of clear deliverables that are established and agreed within the fellowship (although which might be changed by agreement as the fellowship progresses), and these will need to be made open access. The exact approach will be dependent on the project and sector.

No, for the expression of interest the application and assessment process as focused on the idea/innovation that's being put forward and applicants are not required to justify their proposed choice of host organisation. However, we would expect applicants to have considered where is the best place for the fellowship to be delivered.

The climate credentials of the host company are not part of the assessment criteria however, applicants will be required to confirm whether their proposed host organisation has a public plan in place to reduce carbon emissions. Where the proposed host organisation does not have a plan in place or we identify concerns around a company's climate credentials, the Academy will need to be certain that the project has a genuine intent to address climate challenges.

Details will be shared in early February 2025 when applicants are invited to submit a full application. We anticipate that the loan terms will be broadly similar to terms that are available through standard opportunities within the market.

This will depend on what the company are looking to do in the fundraising round at which the loan is converted. Details will be shared in early February 2025 when applicants are invited to submit a full application.

Yes, the IP would be fully owned by that company.

Our expectation is that this will be possible in principle as the loan funds are extremely flexible. However, there’s often an interaction between match-funding requirements and state aid terms for European calls. Any applicant considering this option would need to confirm that the Academy's convertible loan offer (funding from the UK government being delivered by a UK charity) is compatible with the exact state aid terms that apply to the particular call.

No. The award is made on the basis of a loan and can be used for any purpose to deliver the project. Please note that at the point of making the loan the Academy may decide to stipulate some particular conditions as part of the discussions around the commercial terms.

Yes, award will be made at 100% of full economic costs or the highest proportion that is compatible with the requirements of the Subsidy Control Act for the type of project that is being proposed. For most university-based projects, we anticipate that funding will be possible at 100% fEC. For projects that are close to application and would fall under the category of experimental development projects under supporting guidance to the Subsidy Control Act, we will determine on a case-by-case basis what class the project will fall into and hence what ratio is appropriate.

The Academy would expect that the Green Future Fellow would be the secondee. If a company is considering an alternative arrangement, then please contact the Academy for further advice.

The university would act as the primary recipient of the fellowship with the award paid directly to the university. The fellowship can be used to support activities both within the university and within the company that are relevant to the Green Future Fellowship programme of work.

In principle the Green Future Fellow can hold a patent related to the technology.  The Academy would need suitable assurances that others would be able to freely benefit and use the knowledge generated and that there would be no non-incidental benefit back to the patent owner.