Google PhD Fellowship Program: Empowering Tomorrow’s Innovators

The Google PhD Fellowship Program stands as a prestigious opportunity for aspiring scholars who are shaping the future of technology through cutting-edge research. Designed to identify and support exceptional PhD candidates in computer science and related fields, this fellowship not only provides financial assistance but also connects recipients to Google Research Mentors, creating a unique bridge between academia and industry.

At Google, nurturing the academic community is more than a priority—it’s a commitment. Through the PhD Fellowship Program, Google recognizes and invests in individuals whose research holds the promise to transform how we interact with technology, address global challenges, and improve lives worldwide. The program spans continents, championing diversity, excellence, and innovation in research.

A Global Fellowship for the Next Generation of Tech Leaders

The Google PhD Fellowship is offered across multiple regions including Africa, Australia, Canada, East Asia, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and the United States. It supports promising doctoral students from all backgrounds, especially those aiming to make a meaningful impact through original, bold, and socially relevant research.

This fellowship not only provides recognition and funding but also offers mentorship from leading researchers at Google. This invaluable connection allows students to receive guidance from some of the most forward-thinking minds in technology, creating pathways for collaboration and career advancement.

Key Dates for the 2025 Fellowship Cycle

Applications Open: April 10, 2025
Application Deadline: May 15, 2025, at 11:59:59 PM AoE (UTC-12)
Notification of Decisions By: August 31, 2025
Public Announcement of New Fellowship Recipients By: October 31, 2025

It’s important to note that application submissions must be submitted by an official representative of the university. Students interested in applying should coordinate with their academic department to initiate the nomination process.

Submit Nominations

Eligibility and Application Process

The Google PhD Fellowship Program welcomes applications for outstanding PhD students worldwide. The details of each Fellowship vary by region.

PhD students from Africa, Australia, Canada, East Asia, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East, New Zealand, Southeast Asia and the United States, must be nominated for the fellowship by their university. Applications must be submitted by an official representative of the university during the application window. Please contact your department or graduate school for more information on the internal nomination process.

Areas of Research Focus

Google PhD Fellowships are awarded to students conducting innovative research in key disciplines, including but not limited to:

Algorithms and Optimization

Algorithms and optimization form the foundations of computer science, focusing on designing efficient methods to solve complex contemporary problems including problems with applications in machine learning, data science, and modern AI. The primary goals in this area are to create methods that improve resource efficiency and sometimes offer guarantees on the quality of the solution. This line of research is crucial since it studies the solvability of problems through a set of tools that nicely complement machine learning techniques. For this area, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

Combinatorial optimization
Market algorithms
Operations research
Continuous optimization and learning
Scalable algorithms
Other

Computer Architecture

Computer architecture is foundational for computer science generally, and Google in particular. Google’s architecture research is diverse and deep, from processor design to understanding how AI can profoundly change the way we think about how we design circuits. We are interested in proposals in all areas of computer architecture that demonstrate creativity, deep understanding, and bold thinking.

Health Research

Subtopics: Population health, Complex medical data, Consumer health

Google’s Health research aims to advance AI and technology that helps people live healthier lives. Achieving this goal will require collaborative research with public officials, clinicians, and consumers. In partnership with public officials, we are creating tools to understand population level health. With clinicians, we are developing novel algorithms to better understand and make use of complex medical data such as images, text, lab tests, and genomics. With consumers, we are developing technology that helps people find high quality health information and better understand their own health status. By focusing on inclusive, transformative research we aim to improve the lives of billions of people. For this area, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

Generating and understanding large datasets of the world to derive useful insights for improving population health, especially in under resourced regions or communities
Novel algorithm development for better understanding of complex medical data, with focus areas in novel methods, novel applications, or underserved settings
Novel methods, including both software and hardware, that helps extract health insights cheaper, faster, or better

Human-Computer Interaction

The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research area aims to supports academic research advancing innovative, human-centered interactive systems. We are particularly interested in proposals exploring foundational principles, guidelines, and theories shaping the future of HCI in the era of generative AI, including but not limited to:

Human-AI Collaboration: Novel interaction paradigms, explainable AI, and trust in AI systems.
AI for Accessibility: Leveraging AI to make technology more inclusive.
Responsible AI in HCI: Ethical, fair AI systems that respect user privacy and agency.
Interactive Machine Learning: Enabling users to understand, control, and interact with ML models. Novel perceptual algorithms for physical interaction in extended reality.

While we welcome research across all HCI sub-areas, we are particularly excited about proposals aligned with Google’s focus on predictive and intelligent UIs, mobile and ubiquitous computing, extended reality (XR), cross-device interaction, social computing, and interactive visualization.

Machine Learning and ML Foundations

Machine learning, a cornerstone of Google’s research initiatives, encompasses a vast spectrum of exploration. This includes fundamental theoretical investigations into algorithms and their underlying principles, as well as the development of practical applications that address real-world challenges. Through these diverse research endeavors, Google aims to advance the state-of-the-art in machine learning and harness its potential to drive innovation across a wide range of domains. For this area, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

Learning algorithms & techniques
Learning theory
Federated learning
Information theory
Optimization for ML algorithms
Reinforcement learning
Robotics
Recommender systems

Machine Perception

Subtopics: Audio / Image / Video Understanding, Action Recognition, Digital Media Processing, Neural and Classical Image/Video Compression, Object Detection and Recognition, Speech, Robotics

Machine perception researchers at Google develop algorithms and systems to tackle a wide range of tasks, including action recognition, object recognition and detection, hand-writing recognition, audio understanding, perceptual similarity measures, and image and video compression. A main focus is on generative methods for creating exciting and novel images and video.

Natural Language Processing

Subtopics: Generation & Summarization, Information Retrieval & Text Mining, Question Answering, Grounding & Factuality, Dialogue, Translation & Multilinguality, Multimodality & Language Grounding to Vision

Google research in Natural Language Processing comprises multiple research groups working on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation projects. Our researchers are focused on advancing the state of the art in natural language technologies and accelerating adoption everywhere for the benefit of the user. Natural Language Processing and Understanding plays a major role in driving Google’s company-wide efforts as language understanding is the key to unlocking Google’s approach: “Build a more helpful Google for everyone that increases the world’s knowledge, success, health, and happiness.”

Privacy, Safety, and Security

Google Privacy, Safety, and Security is committed to ensuring that the internet is safer for everyone. To meet this goal, we support and partner with academia to bring about state of the art advancements across a broad range of privacy, security, and safety areas. For this area, we call for proposals specifically on:

Novel applications of AI for privacy, security, and safety
Ensuring the privacy, security, and safety of AI systems
User and measurement studies of privacy, security, and safety
Applied cryptography
Differential privacy
Hardware security and side-channel analysis
Software vulnerabilities, software supply chains, and fuzzing

Topics outside of these areas will still be considered. However, we encourage applicants to align their proposals with one of the above topics.

Quantum Computing

Two primary goals of Google’s Quantum AI research are to develop a fault tolerant quantum computer that is capable of handling commercial, quantum-advantaged workloads and to identify novel applications that can be executed on quantum hardware. We actively collaborate with academic partners to advance these goals and we welcome the submission of proposals containing innovative ideas. For this area, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

Quantum algorithms
Quantum error correction
Early fault-tolerant quantum computing
NISQ experiments, prioritizing scientific discovery or beyond classical
Superconducting qubits
Classical methods for simulating quantum algorithms

Software Engineering and Programming Languages

Research on all aspects of software, including software engineering and programming languages. This includes software development methodologies and tools, debugging practices and tools, software testing strategies and tools, cooperation strategies for developers, interface and library design, programming language implementation, code optimization and verification techniques, etc.

Systems, Networking, and Cloud Computing

Research for Systems, Networking and Cloud Computing focuses on exploration of future software and hardware for global distributed systems at unprecedented scale. We have interests ranging over the entire SW/HW stack: from firmware to operating system kernels to global storage to ML execution environments and cloud-scale orchestration; from novel networking hardware to communications protocols and network management, both for datacenters and global networks; and from custom processors to custom HW accelerators and their systems infrastructure.

Review Criteria

Applications are evaluated on the strength of the research proposal, research impact, student academic achievements, and leadership potential. Research proposals are evaluated for innovative concepts that are relevant to Google’s research areas, as well as aspects of robustness and potential impact to the field. Proposals should include the direction and any plans of where your work is going in addition to a comprehensive description of the research you are pursuing.

In Canada and the United States, East Asia and Latin America, essay responses are evaluated in addition to application materials to determine an overall recommendation.

See past PhD Fellowship recipients.

FAQs

What does the Google PhD Fellowship include?

Africa

Up to 3 year Fellowship
US $12K to cover stipend and other research related activities, travel expenses including overseas travel
Google Research Mentor

Australia and New Zealand

1 year Fellowship
AUD $20K to cover stipend and other research related activities, travel expenses including overseas travel
Google Research Mentor

Canada and the United States

Up to 2 year Fellowship
US $85K per year: $70K Cost of Education allowance towards tuition and fees and $15K stipend to be used for living expenses, travel and personal equipment (effective from 2025 for new recipients)
Google Research Mentor

East Asia

1 year Fellowship
US $10K to cover stipend and other research related activities, travel expenses including overseas travel
Google Research Mentor

Europe and the Middle East

Up to 2 year Fellowship
Yearly bursary towards stipend / salary, health care, social benefits, tuition and fees, conference travel and personal computing equipment. The bursary varies by country.
Google Research Mentor

India

Early-stage PhD students

Up to 4 year Fellowship
US $50K to cover stipend and other research related activities, travel expenses including overseas travel
Google Research Mentor

Late-stage PhD students

1 year Fellowship
US $10K to recognise research contributions, cover stipend and other research related activities, travel expenses including overseas travel
Google Research Mentor

Latin America

Up to 2 year Fellowship
US $15K per year to cover stipend and other research related activities, travel expenses including overseas travel
Google Research Mentor

Southeast Asia

Up to 3 year Fellowship
US $10K per year for up to 3 years (or up to graduation, whichever is earlier) to cover stipend and other research related activities, travel expenses including overseas travel
Google Research Mentor

Is my university eligible for the PhD Fellowship Program?

Africa, Australia/New Zealand, Canada, East Asia, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the United States: Universities must be an accredited research institution that awards research degrees to PhD students in computer science (or an adjacent field).

Restrictions: All award payments and recipients will be reviewed for compliance with relevant US and international laws, regulations and policies. Google reserves the right to withhold funding that may violate laws, regulations or our policies.

What are the eligibility requirements for students?

General Eligibility Requirements (All Regions):

Students must remain enrolled full-time in the PhD program for the duration of the Fellowship or forfeit the award.
Google employees, and their spouses, children, and members of their household are not eligible.
Students that are already supported by a comparable industry award are not eligible. Government or non-profit organization funding is exempt.
Past awardees from the PhD Fellowship program are not eligible to apply again.

Region-Specific Eligibility Requirements:

Universities should only nominate students that meet the following requirements

Africa, India, Latin America, and Southeast Asia
- Incoming or early-stage PhD students can be nominated by their university; however, the Fellowship award is contingent on the awardee registering for a full-time PhD program in computer science (or an adjacent field) within the academic award year of the Fellowship award, or the award shall be forfeited.
- Grant of the Fellowship does not mean admission to a PhD program. The awardee must separately apply and be accepted to a PhD program in computer science (or an adjacent field) at an eligible institution.
- Grant of the Fellowship will be subject to the rules and guidelines applicable in the institution where the awardee registers for the PhD program.

Australia and New Zealand
- Early-stage students enrolled in the first or second year of their PhD (no requirement for completion of graduate coursework by the academic award year).

Canada and the United States
- Students who have completed graduate coursework in their PhD by the academic award year when the Fellowship begins.

East Asia
- Students who have completed most of their graduate coursework in their PhD by the academic award year when the Fellowship begins. Students should have sufficient time for research projects after receiving a fellowship.

Europe and the Middle East
- Students enrolled at any stage of their PhD are eligible to apply.

What should be included in an application? What language should the application be in?

All application materials should be submitted in English.

The required materials vary depending on your region.

Universities will need to submit the following materials in a single, flat (not portfolio) PDF file.

Required Materials for All Nominated Students:

Student CV with links to website and publications (if available)
Research/dissertation proposal (maximum 3 pages, excluding references)

Region-Specific Requirements for Nomindated Students:

Africa, Europe, and the Middle East:
- Cover sheet signed by the Department Chair confirming the student passes eligibility requirements. (See FAQ “What are the eligibility requirements for students?”)
- Short (1-page) CV of the student’s primary PhD advisor
- 2-3 letters of recommendation from those familiar with the nominee’s work (at least one from the thesis advisor for current PhD students)
- Transcripts of current and previous academic records

Australia and New Zealand:
- Transcripts of current and previous academic records
- 1-2 letters of recommendation from those familiar with the nominee’s work (at least one from the thesis advisor)

Canada, East Asia, and the United States:
- Cover sheet signed by the Department Chair confirming the student passes eligibility requirements. (See FAQ “What are the eligibility requirements for students?”)
- Short (1-page) CV of the student’s primary advisor
- 2-3 letters of recommendation from those familiar with the nominee’s work (at least one from the thesis advisor)
- Student essay response (350-word limit) to: “Describe the desired impact your research will make on the field and society, and why this is important to you. Include any personal, educational and/or professional experiences that have motivated your research interests.”
- Student essay response (350-word limit) to: “Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or contributed to group efforts over time. (A leadership role can mean more than just a title…)”
- Transcripts of current and previous academic records

India & Southeast Asia
- Short (one-page) resume/CV of the student applicant’s primary PhD program advisor
- Available transcripts (mark sheets) starting from the first year/semester of Bachelor’s degree to date
- 2-3 letters of recommendation from those familiar with the applicant’s work (at least one from the thesis advisor for current PhD students)

Latin America
- Cover sheet signed by an official representative of the university (e.g. advisor, department chair, etc.) confirming the student passes eligibility requirements. (See FAQ “What are the eligibility requirements for students?”)
- Short (one-page) resume/CV of the student applicant’s primary PhD program advisor
- Transcripts (mark sheets) starting from the first year/semester of Bachelor’s degree to date
- Research proposal (maximum 3 pages, excluding references)
- 2-3 letters of recommendation from those familiar with the applicant’s work (at least one from the thesis advisor for current PhD students)
- Student essay response (350-word limit) to: “Describe the desired impact your research will make on the field and society, and why this is important to you. Include any personal, educational and/or professional experiences that have motivated your research interests.”
- Student essay response (350-word limit) to: “What are your long-term goals for your pathway in computing research, and how would receiving the Google PhD Fellowship help you progress toward those goals in the short-term?”

How do I apply for the PhD Fellowship Program? Who should submit the applications? Can students apply directly for a Fellowship?

To apply for the Google PhD Fellowship Program, please follow these steps:

University Nomination: All students must be nominated by an eligible university during the application period; direct applications from students are not accepted.
Review the eligibility and application requirements: Please carefully review the eligibility criteria and application requirements specific to your region (see FAQs above).
Submit application: Please contact your department or graduate school for information about your university’s internal nomination process. If nominated, your university will submit your application on your behalf. The application submission portal will be available on the program page when the application period begins.

How many students may each university nominate?

Australia and New Zealand: Universities may nominate up to two eligible students.

Southeast Asia: Universities may nominate up to three eligible students.

Canada and the United States: Universities may nominate up to four eligible students.

Africa, East Asia, Europe, India and the Middle East: Universities may nominate up to three eligible students. We encourage nominating students with diverse backgrounds especially those from historically marginalized groups in the field of computing. If more than two students are nominated then we strongly encourage the additional nominee who self-identifies as a woman.

Latin America: Universities may nominate any number of eligible students.

*Applications are evaluated on merit. Please see FAQ for details on how applications are evaluated.

How are applications evaluated?

In Canada and the United State, East Asia and Latin America, essay responses are evaluated in addition to application materials to determine an overall recommendation.

A nominee’s status as a member of a historically marginalized group is not considered in the selection of award recipients.

Research should align with Google AI Principles.

Incomplete proposals will not be considered.

How are Google PhD Fellowships given?

Any monetary awards will be paid directly to the Fellow’s university for distribution. No overhead should be assessed against them.

What are the intellectual property implications of a Google PhD Fellowship?

Fellowship recipients are not subject to intellectual property restrictions unless they complete an internship at Google. If that is the case, they are subject to the same intellectual property restrictions as any other Google intern.

Will the Fellowship recipients become employees of Google?

No, Fellowship recipients do not become employees of Google due to receiving the award. The award does not preclude future eligibility for internships or employment opportunities at Google, nor does it increase the chances of obtaining them. If they are interested in working at Google, they are welcome to apply for jobs and go through the same hiring process as any other person.

Can Fellowship recipients also be considered for other Google scholarships?

Yes, Fellowship recipients are eligible for these scholarships.

After award notification, when do the Google PhD Fellowships begin?

Google PhD Fellowships begin at the start of the upcoming school year after award notification.

What is the program application time period?

Applications for the Google PhD Fellowship Program will open in April and close in May (see Application status above). Application details vary by region. Please refer to the main Google PhD Fellowship Program page under ‘How to apply’ for specific information about your region.

How can I ask additional questions?

We receive a high volume of emails, and to ensure we can respond to time-sensitive inquiries, we encourage you to first check our website for answers to your questions. Many common questions are addressed in our FAQs and other resources.

If you’ve reviewed the available information and still need assistance, please contact the appropriate team for your region. Please note that due to the volume of inquiries, we may not be able to respond to questions already answered on the website.

Contact Information by Region:

Africa: africa-phdfellowship@google.com
Australia and New Zealand: research-programs-aunz@google.com
Canada and the United States: phdfellowship@google.com
East Asia: research-programs-ea@google.com
Europe and the Middle East: eme-phdfellowship@google.com
India: research-programs-in@google.com
Latin America: research-programs-latam@google.com
Southeast Asia: research-programs-sea@google.com

Ready to apply? Connect with your university’s graduate department today and begin your journey toward joining a global network of visionary researchers.

Submit your application here before May 15, 2025 (11:59:59 pm UTC-12).

For more information, including FAQs and detailed application guidelines, visit the official Google PhD Fellowship Program website.

For more opportunities, please visit our website.

Let your research speak—and let the world listen.