DDSA Fellowship Programme, Denmark

The Danish Data Science Academy DDSA Fellowship Programme is a fully funded scholarship to support visionary PhD students and postdocs in data science to achieve scientific excellence and impact.

New national academy that supports data science talent development broadly, including machine learning, artificial intelligence and the internet of things.

DDSA, Denmark

The main objective of the DDSA Fellowship Programme is to attract and educate excellent PhD students and postdocs within data science, achieve scientific excellence and impact, while simultaneously extending the application of data science in relevant scientific domains.

The Danish Data Science Academy will primarily support and implement three types of activities.

• Scholarships for PhD and postdoctoral projects, including collaborative projects with hospitals and industry. The scholarships will be awarded following application rounds in open competition. Danish and international students will also have the opportunity to apply for travel scholarships.
• Financial support for courses and activities for developing new or improved teaching and training courses within data science. The Academy will also create a forum for national coordination and the exchange of experience between universities and the users of their services.
• Financial support for meetings, conferences and symposia, including events hosted and organized by the Academy with the aim of fostering internationalization, collaboration, networking and knowledge sharing across disciplines, institutions and sector.

All DDSA scholarships are fixed individual awards to the most promising candidates. Funding young researchers is instrumental to obtaining one of the overarching goals of the DDSA: to increase volume and quality of data science research. Furthermore, fellowship holders will be key participants in the efforts to build a data science community across disciplines.

By focusing on fully funded fellowships we aim to support visionary data science students that want to pursue their ambitious research ideas at a Danish university.

The programme is dedicated to promoting equal opportunities for all applicants regardless of gender, nationality, background, and geography. Applications will be invited yearly via an open competition call.

The 2022 call for PhD applications requires that applicants have a full Master’s degree. However, from 2023 an onwards, the DDSA will also welcome applications from Bachelor and Master’s students who wish to integrate their pre-graduate and PhD education (the so-called 3+5 or 4+4 programmes).

Fellowship Call Details

Starting from 2022 to 2026, the DDSA fellowship program supports the 50 fully PhD scholarships, 18 Postdoctoral fellowships, and 300 travel and visit grants.

Year	PhD	Postdoc	Travel	Visit
2022	10	–	30	30
2023	10	6	30	30
2024	10	6	30	30
2025	10	6	30	30
2026	10	–	30	30

Eligibility for the Fellowships

To be an eligible candidate for the DDSA Fellowship Programme, applicants’ research topics must adhere to either the research scope of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Data Science Initiative, or the research scope of VILLUM FONDEN

Scientific scope of the Data Science Fellowships financed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF)

To be eligible for a scholarship financed by the NNF, the research activity must be within the scope of the NNF Data Science Initiative, which covers the following areas:

• Development of new algorithms, methods and technologies within data science, artificial intelligence (incl. machine learning and deep learning), data engineering, data mining, statistics, applied math, computer science, big data analytics, etc.
• Applications of data science (as defined above) within the NNF’s scientific focus areas: Biomedical and health science, life science and industrial applications promoting sustainability, as well as natural and technical sciences with potential application in biotechnology or biomedicine.

For projects mainly concerned with methods development, it is important that the applicants argue convincingly for potential application and impact within the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s scientific focus areas. The potential application could be beyond the project period. Vice versa, projects that have their primary focus on the application side must describe and explain the novelty and impact of their data science approach, be it development of novel methods or novel applications of existing methods.

In general, projects without potential applications within the NNF’s scientific focus areas and projects with no novelty in terms of development or application of data science methods will not be eligible for funding.

Scientific scope of the Data Science Fellowships financed by VILLUM FONDEN

To be eligible for a scholarship financed by VILLUM FONDEN, the research activity must be within data science or the application of data science to topics in technical science, natural science, humanities or social science or a combination of these. The Foundation is favorably inclined towards applicants coming from other fields and wishing to pursue a PhD within data science. The project may combine a core of computer science with one or more application domains

For more details about the DDSA Fellowship

Open calls – DDSA Fellowships Programme