Programme Thesis
The Mozilla Fellowship Program funds visionary technologists, researchers, and advocates who build open, people-centered technology to address critical societal challenges—such as privacy, AI accountability, climate justice, and open infrastructure—and who share their work publicly to inspire and enable a better tech future.
Selection Criteria
- Commitment to technology serving people, not profit or scale for its own sake
- Demonstrated impact through building tools, platforms, art, or movements (e.g., privacy, AI auditing, climate justice, open infrastructure)
- Openness and knowledge sharing: writing, speaking, teaching, or building in the open
- Career stage: rising star ready to scale impact beyond local context, or established leader ready to set field agenda
- Community-centered approach: building with communities, not for them
- Feasibility and ambition of proposed Fellowship project (tool, platform, creative work, dataset, or innovation)
Past Winners / Cohort Profiles
Over 200 Fellows supported since 2015, including technologists embedded with civil society organizations and independent innovators. Archetypes include AI auditors, disinformation researchers, privacy advocates, and open infrastructure builders. Named examples not provided on page, but typical profiles include mid-career to senior leaders with a track record of public-interest tech work and community engagement.
Ideal Candidate Fingerprint
A mid-career or senior technologist/researcher who has already built open-source tools or platforms addressing a pressing societal issue (e.g., AI accountability, digital rights, climate justice), actively shares knowledge through public channels, and is at a pivotal moment to scale their impact globally. They are community-rooted, not profit-driven, and their proposed project serves as a concrete proof point of people-centered technology.
Recommended Framing
Eniola should frame his application around his open-source, community-first computational tools that tackle public-health challenges—specifically the CCT addiction model (a pharmacological framework for reward-memory prevention) and the TOPOLOGIX drug-resistance predictor—as concrete examples of technology serving people. He should propose a Fellowship project that expands Mozilla's mission of open, privacy-respecting infrastructure by building a reproducible, open-source platform for democratizing drug discovery and addiction neuroscience research, empowering LMIC researchers and communities through shared, transparent tools.
Watch Out
The fellowship's strong emphasis on internet health, digital rights, and policy may not directly align with Eniola's core research areas (neuroscience, protein ML, dynamical systems). He must explicitly connect his work to Mozilla's mission of open, people-centered technology and public good. Additionally, as an independent researcher without a PhD, he may face competition from more senior applicants; he should emphasize his 'rising star' trajectory and pivotal career moment.