Ashok Kumar Fellowship

Applications for the 2023 Ashok Kumar Fellowship have now closed. Details of the 2024 Fellowship will be published in due course. 

The Ashok Kumar Fellowship provides funding for one successful candidate each year to spend three months working at the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST).

The post-holder will be expected to produce a short briefing paper, contribute to a longer report, assist a select committee in a current inquiry, and/or carry out related activities on an area of public policy related to science and engineering. The topic of the work will be selected by POST or the relevant parliamentary team.

The Fellowship is jointly funded by IChemE and the Materials Processing Institute.

Who was Ashok Kumar?

Ashok Kumar was the only serving chemical engineer in UK Parliament at the time of his sudden death in March 2010. An IChemE Fellow, Kumar had been the Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland since 1997, his second spell in parliament following a brief stint in 1991. Prior to his career in politics, Kumar spent 14 years working as a research scientist for British Steel at the Teesside Technology Centre in Grangetown. From that background he took with him a strong conviction of the importance of industrial research and development to the UK’s economy.

Previous fellowship briefing notes examples