Call for Applications for 2026-2029 IAIFI Fellows
The NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) is seeking early-career scientists working at the intersection of Physics and AI for its Postdoctoral Fellowship!
Applications for this sixth round of IAIFI Fellows are due on Wednesday, October 8, 2025.
Apply on Academic Jobs Online (AJO) now!
One of the inaugural NSF AI research institutes, IAIFI is enabling physics discoveries and advancing foundational AI through the development of novel AI approaches that incorporate first principles, best practices, and domain knowledge from fundamental physics. AI is transforming many aspects of society, including the ways that scientists are pursuing groundbreaking discoveries.
To facilitate these advances, the IAIFI seeks a talented and interdisciplinary group of researchers at an early stage of their careers to join the IAIFI Fellowship program. The role of an IAIFI Fellow is to spark vital interdisciplinary, multi-investigator, multi-subfield collaborations across the primary IAIFI domains of theoretical physics, experimental physics, astrophysics, and foundational AI. Such collaborations have immense power to generate new ideas and approaches in both physics and AI, to facilitate abstracting physics challenges beyond their native domains to inform the development of cutting-edge AI tools, and to instill a common language across disciplines. The program aims to appoint new postdoctoral IAIFI Fellows each academic year, for a three-year fellowship term each.
Fellows will have substantial freedom in choosing their research focus; each fellow will work with two IAIFI mentors – one from Physics and one from AI – to guide their choice of research topic and evaluate their research progress. Part of the application will include identifying IAIFI faculty whom the applicant feels would be a good match for their research goals. IAIFI is committed to building a vibrant intellectual community, and strongly encourages applications from interested researchers, regardless of background.
Fellows will be selected through an annual application process. Offers for this fellow position will be contingent on availability of funding. However, there may be other related opportunities available through IAIFI faculty, and the application allows an opt-in to have materials shared with IAIFI faculty for that purpose.
IAIFI is a joint NSF-funded venture between MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts. Fellows are encouraged to collaborate with other IAIFI members. All Fellows are granted work space at MIT. In addition, Fellows can be affiliated with and have work space at any of the four Boston-area IAIFI universities.
Learn more about the IAIFI Fellowship.
Requirements:
Applicants should have, or expect to receive, a PhD in Physics, Statistics, Computer Science or a related field by September 1, 2026.
Complete applications must include:
- Cover letter (no more than 1 page)
- CV (1-2 pages recommended, but longer accepted)
- Statement of research interests (no more than 2 pages)
- List of publications
- Exactly three reference letters
The deadline to receive all the materials (including all reference letters) is October 8, 2025.
Questions:
Direct any inquiries about the program to iaifi-fellows@mit.edu. FAQs are available at: https://iaifi.org/fellows.html#faq.
