Fellowships

Benefits Topics

Supplement

The department no longer offers fellowship supplements or bonuses because of the additional pay fellowship students receive during GSI appointments.

Taxes

Fellowships are payable through the Campus Payroll and do not have withholdings. You may need to pay quarterly taxes to prevent being charged a fee come April. See the IRS website for more information.

Fellowship Spreadsheet

This link leads you to a student-compiled spreadsheet of fellowships and grant awards that incoming and current CBE graduate students may apply for. These fellowships include one-time monetary awards, stipends for PhD study, and postdoctoral fellowships.

The spreadsheet was curated from various online databases, with the most pertinent fellowships suited for CBE students in our department added. The spreadsheet can be filtered based on common requirements and/or, including citizenship requirements, underrepresented minorities (URMs), and research areas. To do this, please use the filter view feature on Google Docs OR download a copy of the spreadsheet and filter the entries on your private copy. For people who have applied or have been awarded to any of the fellowship listed, it would be very helpful to our community if you can leave your name and contact info in the last column of that specific fellowship listing (if you are willing to share your application experience with others!). The spreadsheet might be most useful by filtering based on “Stage of PhD for program/fellowship start”, “Field”, and “Citizenship”. The “Maximum Award Amount” is often an estimated value based on the information provided on the website and not necessarily accurate.

We warmly welcome all users to peruse this list (feel free to share), and caution that this list may not be comprehensive. The fellowships on this list have been curated for CBE PhD students at UC Berkeley. This means that (1) fellowships that limit applications based on the field of study have been filtered to suit the current bodies of work by professors/students in the department and (2) fellowships from institutions/organizations that UC Berkeley students are ineligible for are not included.

Guidelines for CBE Students

Depending on which stage you are in your PhD, there are different fellowships you can apply for. In the first year, many CBE students apply for fellowships that can support most if not the entirety of their PhD studies. We include the top five of these fellowships, primarily based on their award amount:

A small number of fellowships are also available which is geared towards finishing your PhD studies, i.e., dissertation fellowships, these include:

Finally, if you are interested in a postdoctoral position, there are a number of highly competitive fellowships that you can apply to. We list the top five primarily based on award amount alone:

Several fellowships are available based on professional interests, such as AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows Program (sci-comm).

For non-U.S. citizens, it is important to check eligibility based on US citizenship. Our spreadsheet includes fellowships that have no US citizenship requirements and they can be filtered based on the ‘Citizenship’ and ‘Intl Stdt Friendly?’ columns. The following is a small sample from our spreadsheet:

Also, check government scholarships from your country and see if there are some available for full-time PhD studies, e.g. Chateaubriand Fellowship, A*STAR National Science Fellowship, Soong Fellowship.

Spreadsheet Maintenance

We plan for the spreadsheet to be reviewed and updated every year and we welcome all inputs from students for maintaining and growing the spreadsheet:

To add a fellowship, fill out this Google form and list, at minimum, the name and URL link of the fellowship.
To notify us of broken links or outdated information, take one of two actions:

a. Grey out the fellowship listing (whole row). Anyone who has access to GSAC files will have edit access to this spreadsheet.

b. Email Tzu-Yang at tyhuang@berkeley.edu to inform him of which fellowship link is broken or no longer available.

Acknowledgments

This spreadsheet has been made possible with the initiative taken by Natalie Goh and the first version of the repository was compiled with the tireless efforts of Anthony Abel, Ashley Bird, Muhammad Hasyim, and Tzu-Yang Huang (2021). First maintenance was done with the support of Grace Anderson, Helen Bergstrom, Salwan Butrus, and Joshua Fernandes (2022). We hope this spreadsheet will be a valuable resource for CBE PhD students in the coming years. Please contact Salwan or Tzu-Yang if you are interested in contributing to this effort, particularly with spreadsheet maintenance or creating a more user-friendly interface for sifting through the spreadsheet.