Harvard Environmental Fellows 2027 — USD 92,000 Postdoc Salary
Fully funded Postdoc scholarship in USA for International students 2026
Five postdocs a year at a USD 92,000 salary for two years in any discipline: the host only has to want you, because Harvard pays the salary rather than the lab.
Eligibility
- A doctorate or comparable terminal degree awarded between May 2023 and August 2027
- A Harvard faculty member willing to host you and to submit a letter of support
- A project that clearly extends beyond your doctoral research
- Open to any discipline, from sciences and engineering to law, policy, design and the humanities
- No nationality restriction is stated
Most postdoctoral positions work like this: a professor wins a grant, and the grant pays you. Harvard's Environmental Fellows Program inverts it. The Center for the Environment pays the salary, and a faculty member only has to agree to host you. That changes the conversation you are having with a potential supervisor, because you are no longer asking for their money.
It also changes who wins. The fellowship is explicitly interdisciplinary and explicitly cross-school, which means a lawyer working on environmental regulation competes with an ecologist and an economist in the same pool. Your discipline is not the differentiator here. The clarity of your proposed project is.
What it covers
Fellows receive an annual salary of USD 92,000 for two years, eligibility for employee health insurance, up to USD 2,500 in relocation reimbursement, and a USD 2,500 annual allowance for travel and other professional expenses. The centre expects to award about five fellowships for the 2027 cohort, which tells you how narrow the door is.
The non-financial part is the reason people take it. Fellows join a co-curricular programme with biweekly dinners alongside Harvard faculty and an invited speaker, and the selection committee deliberately builds a cohort of roughly a dozen scholars across years with different disciplinary backgrounds. If your work is lonely and single-discipline, this is a corrective.
Note what is not promised. The page does not offer housing, a research budget, or a guarantee of office space beyond what the host provides. It states that the host is expected to supply office space and basic administrative support, which means the hosting arrangement is part of the application, not a formality after it.
Who can apply
You need a doctorate or comparable terminal degree awarded between May 2023 and August 2027. That window deliberately includes people who have not yet graduated: if your defence is scheduled before August 2027 you can apply now, which is unusual and useful for final-year doctoral candidates.
There is no nationality restriction in the published criteria, so Afghan, Pakistani, Chinese and American applicants are assessed on the same terms. There is also no field restriction — the programme names sciences, economics, law, government, public policy, public health, medicine, design and the humanities as previous territory, and states that any Harvard faculty member in any discipline may host.
The real constraint is intellectual. Your proposed project must represent an independent line of inquiry that clearly extends beyond your PhD work and beyond the host's ongoing research. A proposal that reads as "chapter four of my thesis, but at Harvard" fails on the first criterion.
Eligibility self-check
Was your doctorate awarded after May 2023, or will it be awarded before August 2027?
Do you have a Harvard faculty member who will write a two-page letter describing their commitment to your project?
Can you explain in one paragraph how your project differs from your dissertation?
Is there a reason this project needs Harvard specifically, rather than any good university?
Have you checked that your intended host is not on the programme's list of faculty unable to host in 2027?
The last question is not a trick. The page names several faculty who are ineligible or unwilling to host this cycle, and an application built around one of them is wasted effort.
Deadline
The application window for the 2027 cohort is open and closes on 1 December 2026. Offers are made for a start the following year, and the centre says it expects around five awards.
Because the host letter is mandatory and written by someone else, 1 December is effectively earlier than it looks. A faculty member needs time to read your proposal, ask questions and write two pages. Approaching a host in the last week of November is the single most common way this application fails.
How to apply
Identify and establish a relationship with a Harvard faculty member early. The centre suggests the Salata Institute's faculty listing as a starting point, and notes that many but not all potential hosts appear there.
Prepare a project proposal that stands on its own: the question, why it matters for environmental policy or science, the method, and what you will do with Harvard's specific resources.
Ask your host to submit a letter of support of no more than two pages describing their commitment and the arrangements they will make for you.
https://environment.harvard.edu/environmental-fellows-program
What to prepare
A project proposal, a CV, and a host letter are the core. Because the host letter carries so much weight, give your host a one-page brief with your project summary, your timeline and the specific things you need from them — office space, lab access, data, introductions — so the letter can be concrete rather than warm.
Common mistakes
Proposing the next chapter of the dissertation. The programme says the project must extend beyond your PhD work, and the committee reads proposals against that sentence.
Approaching a host with a finished proposal and no questions. Faculty agree to host people whose work they want to think about, and a proposal with no opening for their input gives them nothing to say yes to.
Ignoring the excluded-host list and the note that each faculty member may host only one fellow at a time.
Treating the USD 92,000 as a research budget. It is a salary; the travel allowance is USD 2,500 a year, which does not fund fieldwork.
Skipping the interview preparation. A shortlist is invited to discuss the proposal by video with the selection committee, and that conversation is where interdisciplinary fluency is tested.
Tips to win
Read what your prospective host has published in the last two years and design a project that uses a method they do not have. The programme rewards genuine complementarity, not more of the same.
Write the proposal for a reader outside your field. The committee spans disciplines, and a proposal that only an econometrician can follow will lose to one that a historian and a chemist can both assess.
Name the policy consequence. Environmental fellowships at Harvard are judged partly on whether the work could change something, and a proposal that stops at measurement reads as incomplete.
https://oeacnetwork.com/index.php?page=post&id=159
https://oeacnetwork.com/index.php?page=post&id=131
https://oeacnetwork.com/index.php?page=post&id=3
Photo: Marco Almbauer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on this application before you submit it, an OEAC advisor can go through your documents with you and tell you what is missing — the first conversation is free.
Last updated: 11 November 2026
Always confirm the deadline and eligibility on the official page before you apply. Scholarship dates change between rounds, and this listing is a summary — the provider's own page is the authoritative source. OEAC Network lists scholarships for free and is not an agent for any university or funding body.
