Collaborative Postdoctoral Fellowships Programme (CPFP)

Collaborative Postdoctoral Fellowships Programme (CPFP)

Supports interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellowship teams in Ireland through project funding, training, and shared infrastructure for longer-term health research impact.

⚠ This may reflect a past cycle — verify the current call on the funder's site.

The Health Research Board (HRB) Collaborative Postdoctoral Fellowships Programme (CPFP) 2026 funds interdisciplinary consortia to recruit and support three postdoctoral researchers over a 42-month project, with each fellow conducting a 36-month programme of work. The scheme replaces the former Applying Research into Policy and Practice (ARPP) fellowships and is designed to enhance postdoctoral training by enabling researchers to tackle identified problems in health, public health, or social care through collaboration across disciplines and with non-academic stakeholders. The HRB administers this programme as part of its approximately €50 million annual investment in Irish health research.

Each award provides €950,000 in direct research costs. Consortium leadership requires a Lead Applicant and one or two Co-Lead Applicants from different disciplinary backgrounds, all based in academic settings in Ireland and holding a PhD or equivalent research experience of four or more years at postgraduate level. Non-academic stakeholder partners are encouraged where relevant. For-profit organisations and nonprofits are ineligible as lead institutions; the host must be an academic or recognised research organisation. A two-stage application process applied, with a pre-application followed by invitation to submit a full application. The CPFP 2026 cycle closed on 17 December 2025, with decisions expected in November 2026.

Applications were submitted through the HRB Grant E-Management System (GEMS). Webinar recordings and guidance documents produced by HRB are available on the HRB website for applicants developing future proposals. Competitive applications will articulate a clearly defined health or social care problem, demonstrate the interdisciplinary composition of the consortium, and show how the three postdoctoral projects collectively address different facets of that problem with a credible plan for non-academic engagement.