The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative is seeking outstanding scholars for the second round of Biswas Postdoctoral Fellowships starting in mid-2026. Five fellowships will be awarded, covering 4 years of salary, starting at $90k/year and full MIT employee benefits, and some expenses.

Sanjit and Hope Biswas created the Biswas Family Foundation with the mission to harness the power of science and technology by funding innovative projects that promise to democratize healthcare and improve millions of lives. The Foundation provides generous support for the Biswas Postdoctoral Fellows Program at MIT.

A key initiative of MIT HEALS, the Biswas Fellows Program supports top-tier postdoctoral scholars in advancing groundbreaking research in the life sciences and health. The program aims to attract exceptional early-career researchers focused on high-impact, interdisciplinary research in areas such as AI/computation and health, low-cost diagnostics, nano-scale therapeutics, neuroscience, and women’s health, and fundamental discovery-driven science.

MIT HEALS works to expand the Institute’s role as a central hub for innovation, connectivity, and translation in life sciences and health in the Boston area. Seeking to accelerate high-impact solutions for human health and beyond, MIT’s leading experts will form new, cross-disciplinary ventures—and build on existing successes—that connect the Institute to leading industry partners and area hospitals. Biswas Fellows will be part of this ecosystem, pursuing ambitious goals in research relevant to human health and life sciences. The focus is on transformative research innovations and new discoveries involving the convergence of engineering, science, computing/AI, economics, business, policy, design and the built environment, or the humanities.

This new postdoctoral program is designed to give scholars at an early stage of their careers an opportunity to pursue promising research. Biswas Fellows receive a four-year, fully funded appointment at MIT and benefit from faculty mentorship, a strong cohort of other Biswas Fellows, and participation in community events focused on careers in academia, industry, and entrepreneurship.

The Biswas Fellows will be awarded with a preference for those conducting research that is considered high risk/high impact and thus not easily funded through traditional sources, in cross-cutting areas including, but not limited to AI/computation and health, low-cost diagnostics, nano-scale therapeutics, neuroscience, women’s health, and curiosity-driven life sciences research. The proposed work must touch on a key aspect of health and/or the life sciences, consistent with the core mission of HEALS. We encourage work from across all of MIT’s Schools, the College, Departments, and units. Research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries and connects approaches or concepts from different fields is particularly encouraged. Fellows may work with MIT faculty from any department and must include a letter of support from the faculty host in their application materials. Faculty hosts may only support a single applicant for the Biswas Fellows program per application round. Applicants are encouraged to initiate contact with potential faculty hosts early in the process to discuss research plans.

Biswas Fellows will be eligible to apply directly to the Biswas Family Foundation for “fast grants” issued by the Foundation, providing additional discretionary funds for the Fellows to explore leading-edge ideas and bring them to a proof-of-concept stage at which they might be eligible for more traditional funding mechanisms. Uses of this funding include access to computation and experimental resources.