These grants provide funding for researchers to travel to or from the UK, to attend conferences, workshops or short courses. They can also provide funding for travel to partner institutions to develop international collaborative links. Different schemes have different requirements and eligibility criteria, and provide different levels of funding with different restrictions; some will cover all costs, including the registration fees and travel costs; some only a part of the costs.

The purpose of a travel grant is to enhance research capabilities of individual scientists and develop collaborative links. Whether you are a UK based researcher wanting to travel abroad, or an overseas researcher wanting to come to the UK, the list below shows the major organisations active in the UK which offer funding for international research at postdoctoral level or above.

A postdoctoral fellowship is a research opportunity on a temporary or fixed term contract for researchers that have completed a doctoral qualification. They can be between six months and five years, and have traditionally been dedicated purely to research. Fellowships provide postdoctoral researchers with the opportunity to undertake institution or laboratory based research in the UK or another country for a certain period of time. UK research funding providers have fellowship funding opportunities for both UK researchers wanting to work in another country and for researchers wanting to work in the UK.

1. The EURAXESS Jobs website has a searchable database of fellowship programmes throughout Europe. You can filter your search on the basis of country of origin/residence, destination, career stage and research field. Find out more.

2. You can also use the “Funding Search” tool to find fellowships within the UK and internationally.

Some funding agencies offer money to bring together groups of researchers for many different reasons by holding international events, meetings, conferences or workshops. These events can be in specific or crossdiscliplinary subjects, for developing skills, training in a new technique, building networks or sharing of new research and knowledge. The events can be within international research groups or for participants from many different institutions and laboratories representing many countries. Some offer support for the whole event and some offer contributions which require matched funding from other sources.

This is funding for projects with some aspect of international collaboration. This could be the exchange of staff or pooling of research findings, or the creation of a network of researchers working on different aspects of a specific problem. Within the EU, the European Commission is a major funder of international collaboration projects, through the FP7 programme.