Call for Applications: Research Scholar Program 2025

The Research Scholar Program aims to support early-career professors who are pursuing research in fields relevant to Google.

The Research Scholar Program provides unrestricted gifts to support research at institutions around the world, and is focused on funding world-class research conducted by early-career professors.

Research Areas

• 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. For the area, they call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
  • Combinatorial optimization
  • Market algorithms
  • Operations research
  • Continuous optimization and learning
  • Scalable algorithms
• Applied sciences: Large language, visual, and multimodal models have made significant advances in recent years, opening up new possibilities for scientific research. For the area, they call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
  • Applications: Proposals that demonstrate how large language models can be used to advance scientific discovery in a specific field.
  • Foundations and agentic tasks: Proposals that explore broad advances in building, tuning, or deploying large models for scientific research, such as integrating language models with specialized scientific tools, developing agent based models that address complex multi-step tasks potentially requiring code generation, developments of models that help in synthesis of scientific literature, and accelerating scientific analysis, experimentation, and summarization with or without humans in the loop.
  • Evaluation: Proposals that develop datasets or methods for benchmarking and evaluating large models for science, including evaluation of coding ability using appropriate libraries, evaluating domain-specific knowledge, assessing factuality and grounding, evaluating multimodal capabilities, and developing tasks that require multi-step scientific reasoning.
  • HCI: Proposals that enhance scientific workflows, such as automating complex simulation pipelines, with large language models and human-in-the-loop interaction.
• Health research: Google’s Health research aims to advance AI and technology that helps people live healthier lives. For the area, they 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 Google Research Scholar Program in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) supports academic research advancing innovative, human-centered interactive systems. 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.
• Machine learning: Machine learning, a cornerstone of Google’s research initiatives, encompasses a vast spectrum of exploration. For the area, they 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: 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.
• Natural language processing: Natural language processing and understanding plays a major role in driving Google’s company-wide OKRs 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.”
• Networking: Networking is central to modern computing, from WANs connecting cell phones to massive data stores, to the data-center interconnects that deliver seamless storage and fine-grained distributed computing. For the area, they call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
  • Cloud Networking
  • WAN networking
  • Network Infrastructure for Data Centers
• Privacy, safety, and security: Google Privacy, Safety, and Security is committed to ensuring that the internet is safer for everyone. For the area, they 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.
• Quantum computing: Two primary goals of the Quantum AI team are to develop a functional quantum computer that can tolerate errors and to identify novel applications that can be executed on quantum hardware.  For the area, they call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
  • Quantum algorithms
  • Quantum machine learning
  • Quantum error correction
  • Early fault-tolerant quantum computing
  • NISQ experiments
  • Superconducting qubits
  • Neutral atom quantum computing
• Software engineering and programming languages: Research on all aspects of software development, including the engineers and the programming languages, libraries, development tools, and processes that they use.
• Systems: Google’s systems and networking systems research is focused on building and deploying novel systems at unprecedented scale.

Funding Information

• The funds granted will be up to $60,000 USD and are intended to support the advancement of the professor’s research.

Eligibility Criteria

• Applicants must be a full-time assistant, associate, or professor at a university or degree-granting research institution at the time of the application submission.
  • Post-doctoral staff can only serve as a co-PI, not a primary PI.
• Applicants must have received their PhD within seven years of submission (e.g., applicants in 2024 must have received their PhD in 2017 or later).
  • They consider exceptions for applicants who have been teaching seven years or fewer and had delays, such as working in industry, parental leave, leave of absence, etc. This exception request can be documented on the application.
• Applicants can submit one application per round.
  • Faculty can only serve as a PI or Co-PI per round. Applicants cannot serve on two separate proposals.
• Applicants can apply a maximum of 3 times within the 7 years post-PhD.

Evaluation Criteria

• Only complete applications that meet the following criteria will be scored:
  • Submitted by eligible applicants
  • Related to computing or technology
  • Adhere to the required formatting guidelines
• Scoring will be based on the following areas:
  • Faculty merit: Faculty is accomplished in research, community engagement, and open source contributions, with potential to contribute to responsible innovation.
  • Research merit: Faculty’s proposed research is aligned with Google Research interests, innovative, and likely to have a significant impact on the field.
  • Proposal quality: The research proposal is clear, focused, and well-organized, and it demonstrates the team’s ability to successfully execute the research and achieve a significant impact.
  • Broadening Participation: The proposal demonstrates a strong commitment to broadening participation in computing through initiatives such as mentoring underrepresented groups, establishing collaborations with diverse institutions, and disseminating research in accessible formats.
  • For research area topics that require the use of a specific product, methodology, or other constraint, they will evaluate your project based on how well it adheres to and utilizes these aforementioned factors, as well as the overall quality of your approach.

For more information, visit Google Research.