Applications Invited for Berkman Klein Fellowship Program 2025-2026

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About the Organization

The Berkman Klein Center's mission is to explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.

We are a research center, premised on the observation that what we seek to learn is not already recorded. Our method is to build out into cyberspace, record data as we go, self-study, and share. Our mode is entrepreneurial nonprofit.

We bring together the sharpest, most thoughtful people from around the globe to tackle the biggest challenges presented by the Internet.

As an interdisciplinary, University-wide center with a global scope, we have an unparalleled track record of leveraging exceptional academic rigor to produce real-world impact. We pride ourselves on pushing the edges of scholarly research, building tools and platforms that break new ground, and fostering active networks across diverse communities.

United by our commitment to the public interest, our vibrant, collaborative community of independent thinkers represents a wide range of philosophies and disciplines, making us a unique home for open-minded inquiry, debate, and experimentation.

About the Fellowship

Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society welcomes applications for its 2025-2026 fellowships. Fellows will work in Cambridge, MA to conduct independent work as part of one of the Center’s topical workstreams (see details below), in collaboration with BKC faculty, staff, students, and the broader BKC community.

Through this call, the Center will accept candidates across three tracks:

• Academic fellowships for full-time faculty members
• Post-doc fellowships for scholars who have recently completed their PhDs or equivalent
• Non-academic fellowships for accomplished practitioners from outside the academy

About the BKC Fellowships Program:

Over the course of its 25+ year history, BKC has taken a unique approach to developing and delivering innovation in modes beyond the confines of a traditional university. This is due in large part to the unusual model the center has adopted and honed for fellowships. While traditional university programs emphasize and rely on academic credentials as a gate to fellowships, the BKC Fellowship program instead considers the whole person – their path, values, and contributions – in the spirit of the Internet itself.

This has led to an active alumni network of 500+ BKC fellows, with participants going on to advance their careers in academia or work in government, tech, social impact, and the arts. Early projects like Creative Commons and the Digital Public Libraries of America – as well as newly incubated initiatives such as the Integrity Institute and Data Nutrition Project – have demonstrated the crucible of bringing together new and non-esoteric ideas to make progress in the digital space.

2025-2026 Fellowship Workstreams:

For the new academic year, the Center is taking a new approach to its work and its fellowships. We are focusing our efforts on a number of discrete workstreams: bodies of work led by a faculty member that are tied to the critical issues and topics of the day. Workstreams take up problems within those areas that are of clear importance and even urgency, and that lack easy answers. These problems will be at a high enough level of generally not to be picayune, and a high enough level of specificity not to devolve into platitudes or balancing tests. (“We just need to balance security and privacy.”) Making progress on such problems will require expertise from multiple disciplines and approaches, and implementation of mitigations and solutions will typically need different people and organizations with hands on different levers to pull them more or less at once.

Candidates will apply for consideration to be embedded with one of six workstreams at the Center. Those who are selected for a fellowship will collaborate with a team of Harvard faculty, staff, students, and others on projects, tools, events, and publications related to their workstream topic:

• AI Interpretability Ethics and Implications
• AI Ethics with Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation (more information on the joint fellowship here)
• Agentic AI Protocols and Risk Mitigations
• Artificial General Intelligence Futurecasting and Policy Development
• Tech, Tools, and Practices for Improving University Discourse
• Safety Solutions for Social Media

While your fellowship application should showcase the types of projects you're interested in pursuing within your chosen workstream, the final project slate will be determined collectively by your workstream cohort during a fall planning process. All projects will be executed through collaboration among the fellows, faculty, and staff.

Our Collaborative Approach:

We endeavor to assemble a cohort of mission-aligned fellows who will develop plans, events, and projects collaboratively for each workstream. As part of their application materials, prospective fellows should describe their interest in and ability to contribute to a specific workstream; they also may propose a project to be executed in collaboration with BKC faculty, staff, students, and other fellows. Although individual outputs (articles, studies, manuscripts) may be included in the proposal, they ought not to be the centerpiece.

We are most interested in supporting fellows with an interest in convening experts and stakeholders on key issues in novel ways and combinations, and producing a multitude of publicly accessible artifacts (policy recommendations, product prototypes, white papers, etc.) in collaboration with Center faculty and fellows.

Representative examples from past cohorts include:

• A multi-day conference bringing together trust and safety workers to discuss the field’s past, present, and future.
• A closed-door workshop for regulators, platform representatives, and content creators to produce federal policy and industry standard recommendations to advance the creator economy.

Engaging with BKC participants and programming:

Beyond their work with their workstream colleagues, fellows are expected to engage with faculty, staff, students, and other members of the BKC and Harvard University communities. Fellows will be required to take part in a weekly community meeting; they also will be expected to regularly participate in the Center’s programming to learn with and from others and strengthen their own work. This programming could include speaking at and/or participating in workshops, research sessions, and working groups, as well as collaborating with other members of the broader BKC community.

Time and location commitments:

The Fellows program will run for the full academic year, from September 1, 2025 to August 31, 2026. Fellows are expected to be free of the majority of their regular commitments so that they may fully devote themselves to their fellowship and Center workstream. We recognize that fellows who bring their own funding might have specific commitments due to their funding arrangements.

Fellows are required to be in residence in Cambridge, MA from September 2025 through May 2026. During the time spent in residence, they will work from the Berkman Klein Center’s offices on the Harvard Law School campus.

Eligibility

The Berkman Klein Center seeks to be a space for both established and rising scholars and non-academics. Qualifications for these tracks are below, and we ask that candidates specify which track for which they are applying for in their application form.

Our Academic Fellowship track welcomes applications from faculty…

• for whom serving as a professor is their full-time commitment, including assistant, associate, and full professors or equivalent roles in countries outside of the U.S.;
• from any discipline whose scholarship deeply engages with ideas related to either AI or social media and networked communication;
• who have a clear vision of a potential project and a clear sense of the problem(s) their work is addressing;
• who are eager to engage in a cohort setting and work in collaboration with other workstream participants to develop a shared plan, projects, and events to advance the topic as a group;
• who have prior published work in this space and a demonstrated record of contributing to public and scholarly conversations.

Our Post-Doctoral Fellowship track welcomes applications from scholars…

• from any discipline whose scholarship deeply engages with ideas related to either AI or social media and networked communication;
• who have a clear vision of a potential project and a clear sense of the problem(s) their work is addressing;
• who are eager to engage in a cohort setting and work in collaboration with other workstream participants to develop a shared plan, projects, and events to advance the topic as a group; who have prior or upcoming published work in this space and a demonstrated record of contributing to public and scholarly conversations.
• Note: Post-doctoral fellows must have recently received a doctoral degree or other terminal degree, or will by the start of the appointment in September 2025. Individuals who will be enrolled in a degree program in the Fall of 2025 are not eligible for this position.

Our Non-Academic Fellowship track welcomes applications from experts…

• from any professional background whose expertise deeply engages with ideas related to either AI or social media and networked communication;
• who have a clear vision of a potential project and a clear sense of the problem(s) their work is addressing;
• who are eager to engage in a cohort setting and work in collaboration with other workstream participants to develop a shared plan, projects, and events to advance the topic as a group;
• who have prior published work in this space and a demonstrated record of contributing to public and scholarly conversations.

International applicants: We work with the Harvard International Office (HIO) to sponsor visa paperwork for our eligible international fellows. An outline of the visa application process and requirements may be found on the HIO website at: http://hio.harvard.edu/scholar-visa-process.

How to Apply

Applications will be accepted until Wednesday, April 30, at 11:59 pm Eastern Time.

Application materials that will be uploaded into the system:

• Resume or CV
• Cover Letter
• Project Proposal
• Work Sample

Apply here

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Tags Innovations and Technology Skill Development Post Doctorate / PhD Others