A&S opens application portal for Klarman postdoc fellowships

The College of Arts and Sciences invites early-career scholars to apply for up to six Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships. The application deadline is October 14, 2022.

Klarman Fellows pursue research in any discipline in the College, including natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the creative arts as well as cross-disciplinary fields that transcend traditional boundaries. Appointments are for up to three years and begin in late summer/early fall 2023.

“I am delighted to announce that the College of Arts and Sciences is accepting applications for the fourth class of Klarman Fellows,” said Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College. “We have recruited truly impressive cohorts of early-career researchers in the past three cycles, and we are eager to build on that success in the coming year."

The fellowship offers generous salaries, benefits and research support in addition to opportunities for professional development and enrichment.

Each fellow is hosted by a faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences for their entire fellowship period.

In the past three years, the fellowship program has drawn top-notch scholars spanning the full range of the College’s disciplines, ranging from physics to government to history of art. Already, several Klarman Fellows have secured next steps in their careers, including tenure-stream faculty positions at the University of Chicago, University of Southern California, Syracuse University and Cornell itself.

The third cohort of Klarman Fellows starts this fall. One scholar seeks to remedy the nitrate pollution pervading Earth’s waterways; another studies migrations prompted by climate change and other crises. A third develops synthetic macromolecules to be used, ultimately, in plastic-based metal-free batteries. Also explored by individual scholars in this cohort: history of the childcare workforce; behavior of atomically thin quantum materials; neurological causes of impaired social learning; and repertoire for newly invented musical instruments.

Among the most selective of its kind in the country, the Klarman Fellowship program offers postdoctoral opportunities free of grant constraints or teaching responsibilities.

“That openness and flexibility is a gold mine,” said Toni Alimi, Klarman Fellow in philosophy and classics. Alimi’s book project, “Slaves of God,” his focus during the three years of his fellowship, considers Augustine’s justifications of slavery.

“I cannot emphasize enough how amazing it has been to have a whole year where I have no outside commitments and enough funding to conduct more experiments,” said Alejandro Martínez-Marquina, Klarman Fellow in economics, during the first year of his fellowship.

The fellowships are made possible by Seth Klarman ’79, a graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Beth Schultz Klarman. Seth Klarman is CEO of the Boston-based Baupost Group, LLC; Beth Klarman is president of The Klarman Family Foundation.