Brain Korea 21 FOUR
Offers Flagship MOE graduate education and research, supporting long-term sustainable commercialization and growth.
Brain Korea 21 FOUR is the Ministry of Education's flagship graduate education and research quality program, administered by NRF's Academic Research directorate. It runs from September 2020 through August 2027 and is built to support graduate-school level training rather than individual investigator projects. The current cycle covers 63 universities and 595 education-research units, which puts the program at institutional scale from the outset. The annual budget is about 523.8 billion KRW, with a total program budget of roughly 3.2 trillion KRW. The portfolio includes 373 Future Talent Development teams, 222 Innovation Talent Development teams, and Graduate School Innovation Support for 27 additional universities. Universities apply on behalf of department-level units, individual researchers do not apply directly, and the structured eligibility profile keeps the route limited to universities in Korea with Korean-language documentation. That makes BK21 FOUR a fit for departments that can show a durable graduate training pipeline, strong faculty participation, and outcomes tied to research quality as well as education. Success depends on institutional coordination, because the program evaluates the unit, the university, and the long-run training structure rather than a single project idea. Teams that can present an organized graduate school strategy and the staffing to deliver it will read most credibly here.
No upcoming rounds verified. Cadence: One-off.