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 will close on 5 November 2024.

Shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit a full application in late January 2025, with applications due for submission by early April 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.