Fellowship at Microsoft Research Asia

About the program

Application deadline: June 10, 2022, 11:59 PM Beijing Time

The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program aims to empower and encourage PhD students in the Asia-Pacific region to realize their potential in computer science-related research.

The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program identifies the next generation of research leaders through a unique program that offers a combination of mentorship, research, networking, and academic opportunities to promising young candidates. Since its inception in 1999, the program has attracted over one thousand PhD candidates from top universities in the Asia-Pacific region, and 452 outstanding PhD students have been awarded the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship honor. Fellows have gone on to become prominent researchers and influential individuals in academia and industry.

Fellows earn more than a simple scholarship; they enjoy long-term close engagement with Microsoft Research Asia, one of the leading computer science research labs in the world. Each winner has the opportunity to complete an internship, during which they participate in hands-on, advanced research at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China.

For questions about this program, please contact fellowra@microsoft.com.

2022 Award schedule

• June 10, 2022 – Application deadline 
• Mid-August – Online interview (only for a few candidates who pass 1st round review)
• September 2022 – Fellows announced

Provisions of the award

The Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program offers some of the industry’s most competitive incentives and rewards, including: 

• Cash awards of $10,000 USD, which can be used to support research initiatives and academic endeavors including, but not limited to: attending international research conferences/events, and subsidizing paper and patent application fees. 
• Opportunity for intensive and individualized mentorship programs with a dedicated senior researcher, to help facilitate the fellow’s research until graduation.
• Opportunity to attend the Microsoft Research Asia Academic Conference.
• At the discretion of Microsoft Research Asia, advisors of fellows might be invited to participate in collaborative research projects and academic exchange events.

Eligibility criteria

• Applicants must attend a university in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, or Taiwan, and do research work that relates to computing topics in which Microsoft Research is concerned with (click on Research Areas at the top of the page for a full list).
• According to the definition of the normative period of PhD program of the applicant’s university and region, the applicant must graduate in 2024 or later. The applicants and their advisors would be asked for supporting documents if needed.
• Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Committee owns the final interpretation of above clauses.

Supplementary information

Microsoft has always been committed to the mission of empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more and has actively promoted the extensive application of computer technology in various fields and in public welfare undertakings. With the progress of data acquisition, data processing, and artificial intelligence in recent years, computer technology is playing an increasingly important role in the research of basic science. The current problems and challenges faced by human society also require the urgent intersection and integration of basic scientific research and computer science. Based on the current trends and demand, the 2022 MSRA Fellowship will continue to welcome applicants in the field of Computational Science (opens in new tab) in order to discover academic talents who are innovating computer theory and technology to promote the development of basic scientific research, and to support and encourage them to better carry out their potential research work.

Related Computational Science subject areas

Please refer to the Research Areas > Other Sciences menu in the top navigation of this site to learn more about these research areas:

• Computational biology and life science
  • Studies in Pandemic Preparedness
  • Station B
  • Structural and computational insights into the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron RBD-ACE2 interaction
  • Improved Drug-target Interaction Prediction with Intermolecular Graph Transformer
  • Loss of Spike N370 glycosylation as an important evolutionary event for the enhanced infectivity of SARS-CoV-2
  • Exploring the Regulatory Function of the N‐terminal Domain of SARS‐CoV‐2 Spike Protein through Molecular Dynamics Simulation
  • SAMF: a self-adaptive protein modeling framework
  • Complementing sequence-derived features with structural information extracted from fragment libraries for protein structure prediction
• Computational physics
  • Learning Physics-Informed Neural Networks without Stacked Back-propagation
  • Message Passing Neural PDE Solvers 
  • Lie Point Symmetry Data Augmentation for Neural PDE Solvers
  • Solving the Quantum Many-Body Problem with Artificial Neural Networks
• Computational sustainability and environmental science
  • Deep learning for prediction of the air quality response to emission changes 
  • Mimicking atmospheric photochemical modeling with a deep neural network 
  • Exploring deep learning for air pollutant emission estimation
• Computational chemistry and materials science
  • microsoft/Graphormer – a deep learning package that allows researchers and developers to train custom models for molecule modeling tasks. It aims to accelerate the research and application in AI for molecule science, such as material design, drug discovery, etc.
  • Crystal Diffusion Variational Autoencoder for Periodic Material Generation (opens in new tab)
  • Accelerated discovery of 3D printing materials using data-driven multi-objective optimization (opens in new tab)

Evaluation criteria of computational science area applicants

In the Computational Science area, The MSRA Fellowship program focuses on doctoral students who have promoted and expanded research work in the above fields through innovations in computer theory, algorithms, and systems and have made influential achievements. We also look at doctoral students who have made contributions to the development of computer technology by introducing the research methods, theories, and technologies of basic science into the computer science field.