The Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship provides a long-term funding and internship option for master’s and PhD students. Recipients can also access professional development training that helps them ensure project success and gain in-demand career skills.
Interested applicants can apply for the Accelerate Fellowship at any time. All other Accelerate program guidelines apply.
Review Mitacs’ previous special Accelerate funding offers
Contact [email protected] for more information.
Academic supervisors
Partner organizations
Intern
An intern can be a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident, international student with a student visa, or international postdoctoral fellow with a valid work permit. Interns must be 18 years old or over, and fall into one of the following categories:
Further, all parties must declare any potential conflicts of interest upon application submission, including:
Interns may interact remotely with an international partner organization and/or travel to interact in person. Any travel must be in accordance with their Canadian academic institution’s policies.
Please note for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, running from April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026 there is limited funding available for Accelerate and BSI in the provinces of Alberta and Ontario. For questions or concerns, please contact your Mitacs advisor.
Effective April 1, 2025, the Indigenous Pathways initiative will be reopening for the 2025-2026 fiscal year. As part of the new funding criteria, each partner organization will be limited to 12 Internship Units per submission year. Please contact your Mitacs advisor for questions or concerns.
For further details and before initiating an Accelerate application in the respective provinces, please contact your Mitacs Advisor
2. Reach out to one of our Business Development team members to be paired with a Mitacs Advisor
3. Determine the right application process for your project (information below)
Option 1: Our Digital Application Process | Option 2: Our Non-Digital Process |
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In 2024, Mitacs launched a new digital application portal as a first step towards digitizing our entire application process, leveraging digital tools to further enhance your application experience. To be eligible for the new digital process, your project must:
We are striving to enable the above exclusions in our digital application as soon as possible. Steps to apply using our digital process (RAP):
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Mitacs Accelerate is incrementally transitioning to a digital application process. To see if your project is a good fit for the digital process, please review the Accelerate Digital Application Process option. All applications eligible to be submitted via our digital process will be asked to do so. For applications that cannot yet be accommodated in our online portal, the below non-digital option remains open. Steps to Apply:
Proposal Package Requirements:
Please be sure to include supporting documents as required by your university or province. |
Your application will be peer reviewed, which will take approximately six to eight weeks. Proposals with multiple internships or that require revisions may take longer. Please note there is a chance your application will be returned with a request for revisions before it is approved.
Following submission, partner organizations will receive an invoice (refundable if not approved), so that the intern receives payment when the project begins. Please note this invoice may be received before application approval, and does not guarantee approval.
Once an outcome is available, Mitacs will contact all participants with the decision and applicable instructions.
Following formal approval and the receipt of the partner contribution, Mitacs forwards the Accelerate funds to the academic institution to administer the award.
Please note no work should begin on a project until an Award Letter has been issued and funds have been distributed to the institution.
Questions? Consult the FAQ or reach out to [email protected]
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Mitacs invoices a partner organization upon submission of their Accelerate proposal. Upon receipt of the partner’s contribution, Mitacs forwards the research award to the Canadian academic institution. No funds will be released to the academic institution until the invoice has been paid and the proposal is approved. Mitacs has no control over when funds are administered by the academic institution. If you have questions about your Accelerate award after Mitacs has released funds, contact your academic institution’s Office of Research Services (or equivalent).
Mitacs’ policy is to take no position and claims no intellectual property (IP) from projects it funds. All Mitacs Accelerate participants are bound by the IP terms of the academic institution where the intern is enrolled. IP is left to be shared between the academic institution, its researchers, and the partner organization, according to the IP rules of the academic institution, unless a separate agreement is negotiated.
The following universities have developed their own IP terms for Mitacs projects:
Note that these IP agreements may not apply to joint applications with other funding organizations.
External reviewers for internship proposals receive the following questions to guide their assessment of the proposal:
Proposals for large and long-term projects may sometimes involve significant technical or scientific uncertainties, complex project management plans, or highly structured intern recruitment, supervision, and training plans. In these situations, Mitacs reserves the right to hold a review meeting between applicants and reviewers to support the assessment of such proposals before arriving at a final funding decision. The need for such a review meeting will be determined as part of the review process, and applicants will be notified as soon as possible if a review meeting needs to be scheduled.
The following steps outline the responsibilities of each Mitacs Accelerate participant before, during, and after their project. For projects with multiple internships, each intern is responsible for his or her individual steps.
Interns travelling internationally (whether to or from Canada) may have additional or different responsibilities, which can be found on the Accelerate International page.
Mitacs Accelerate Terms and Conditions outline participants’ responsibilities in further detail — each participant is expected to understand and adhere to the Terms and Conditions of the program.