Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

The Austrian Science Fund (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, FWF) is Austria's central funding organisation for basic and arts-based research. Established in 1967 and based in Vienna, it funds investigator-driven research across all disciplines, selecting proposals through international peer review and awarding on scientific quality alone. It is the Austrian counterpart to bodies such as the DFG in Germany or the SNSF in Switzerland, and is a standing partner in European and bilateral funding networks. FWF organises its roughly sixty funding programmes into a public portfolio grouped by channel. excellent=austria carries the large-scale Clusters of Excellence and Emerging Fields schemes. Projects covers Principal Investigator Projects (rolling submission, the core individual grant), Principal Investigator Projects International, Clinical Research, Arts-Based Research, the 1000 Ideas programme for daring or original ideas, and the FWF Wittgenstein Award, Austria's most highly endowed research prize. Careers covers ESPRIT and the FWF ASTRA Awards for early- and mid-career researchers, the Erwin Schrödinger programme for career-enhancing stays abroad, doc.funds and doc.funds.connect for doctoral programmes, and RISE Europe. Collaborations covers Special Research Areas, Specialized Research Groups, #ConnectingMinds and multilateral initiatives, while Communication funds book and digital publications, the Open-Access Block Grant, science communication and Top Citizen Science. Alongside these, FWF administers a large set of subject-specific and international co-funded calls — the Weave bilateral programme with partners including Germany (DFG), Switzerland, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Belgium/Flanders and Italy/South Tyrol, plus joint calls with Israel, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hungary, and European partnerships such as Biodiversa+, Water4All, PerMed, ERA4Health, ERDERA, BrainHealth, OHAMR, EUPAHW, FutureFoodS and BE READY, together with QuantERA, TRANSCAN, ERA-NET HERA and NORFACE, and privately funded awards such as the Gottfried and Vera Weiss Award and the Herzfelder Foundation Projects. Programmes carry rolling, programme-specific or dated submission windows, and the portfolio flags which are currently open.