PhD Salary

Full individual PhD stipend from an external grant

Not many foundations offer a full PhD grant, but here are a few examples:

• Novo Nordisk Foundation - Dara Academy: A national PhD academy supporting early career researchers across natural, technical, health and life sciences through competitive PhD fellowships.
• William Demant Fonden – PhD stipends: Each year they Award PhD stipends for research projects within audiology, hearing or related areas.
• Innovation Fund Denmark – Industrial PhD: You can apply for an industrial PhD to be carried out in the private sector (the PhD is enrolled at a university). 
• COWIfonden – industrial PhD: Each year the foundation awards 1-2 industrial PhD stipends to be carried out at COWI (material in Danish).
• Spar Nord Fonden - Ph.d./Postdoc-program: You can apply for PhD or postdoc salary within a specific theme that changes each year. The PI on the application has to be an associate professor or professor.
• Danish Data Science Academy: 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. Each year from 2022-2026 there will be 10 PhD fellowships available. 

Full PhD stipend where the PhD project is part of a larger project financed externally

Often the easiest way to fund your PhD salary is if your PhD salary is part of a larger research application e.g. for Innovation Fund Denmark (Grand Solutions), the Independent Research Fund Denmark, Horizon Europe project (collaborative project) or large investigator grants. Remember that it often takes more than one year from the application deadline to project start, thus, early planning is necessary.

Use your network, e.g. former supervisors, to get involved with one of these projects. 

PhD stipend from DTU

A Department can choose to co-finance PhD stipend with e.g. 1/3 or 2/3 PhD stipend (the rest has to come from external funding), and/or they can choose to give one or more full PhD stipend. 

External funding is available via DTU PhD scholarships for collaboration with international alliance partner.

PhD salary assembled through many external smaller grants

Another way of securing your PhD salary could be by applying many smaller foundations for part of your salary. However, we cannot recommend this approach as it is very difficult (if not impossible) to receive the necessary funding in time for project start.