MathWorks Call for
Research Proposals

Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts and funding is not extendable. Applicants may submit new proposals for subsequent calls.

PIs may submit only one proposal ahead of each deadline.

Project proposals will be reviewed by an internal awards panel, and the results will be communicated approximately two months after the submission deadline. We will contact the primary PI listed on each proposal and make an announcement on the MathWorks website.

Each research award recipient will be assigned a MathWorks account engineer. Researchers are encouraged to maintain regular communication with their MathWorks contact to discuss ongoing research and seek technical help. We also encourage publishing the outcome of the project and committing any related code to open-source code repositories such as GitHub and File Exchange on MATLAB Central.

Funding is distributed as an unrestricted gift. As such, the funding does not result in any transfer or license of any intellectual property rights. Please refer to the program expectations for more information.

The letter of intent from the commercial partner should outline the potential relevance and impact of the proposed research to the commercial partner, and describe the partner’s plans to collaborate on the project. The letter of intent should be on the commercial partner’s organization letterhead.

Unfortunately, due to the number of proposals we receive, we are unable to provide detailed reasons a proposal was not accepted.

Generative AI tools are not prohibited from being used to write and submit proposals. PIs should indicate in the project description the extent to which, if any, generative AI tools were used and how they were used to develop their proposal.

Proposals will be accepted twice a year, during spring and fall. If you want to be notified when the next submission window is open, please add yourself to the notification request list.

Coding agents and toolkits (such as MATLAB Agentic Toolkit and Simulink Agentic Toolkit) are allowed and encouraged when they strengthen the research approach, improve reproducibility, or create reusable skills, hooks, or domain-specific agents to support the research community. Use of agentic AI tools is optional and not required.

Physical AI, for the purposes of this program, refers to the deployment of AI algorithms on embedded hardware in complex engineered systems. Physical AI research supports workflows such as simulation, testing, verification and validation, safety, and certification for engineered systems that interact with real-world environments.