The e-ASIA Joint Research Program: How ASEAN Researchers Can Access Regional Funding

What e-ASIA JRP funds

The e-ASIA Joint Research Program, coordinated through Japan's Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) , links national funding agencies across Asia to co-fund the same research projects. Instead of one pooled budget, each participating country's agency pays for its own researchers on a joint project, so a Thai principal investigator is paid by a Thai agency and a Vietnamese principal investigator is paid by a Vietnamese agency, even while both work on the same funded proposal together.

Calls for proposals sit under a small set of priority fields that have included environment and energy, biomedicine and infectious disease, information and communication technology, disaster risk reduction, advanced materials, and agricultural science. Priority areas shift from one call to the next, so check the current call document on the e-ASIA JRP site before you or your supervisor draft a proposal.

Who can be part of a project

A funded e-ASIA project needs a principal investigator and research team in each participating country, and calls generally require researchers from several member countries to qualify as multilateral. Participating agencies have included bodies from Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, and other Asia-Pacific countries, though the exact list open to apply changes with each call.

You do not submit an individual application as a graduate student. The principal investigator, almost always a professor or senior researcher at a university or national lab, submits the joint proposal on behalf of the whole team, and graduate students and postdocs join as named researchers or research assistants under that PI's budget.

How to get on a team

• Ask your supervisor directly whether their lab has an active or past e-ASIA JRP project, or a proposal planned for an open call.

• Look up your home country's participating agency, for example NRCT in Thailand , and check its list of currently funded e-ASIA projects to find active principal investigators in your field.

• Attend department seminars or research group meetings where international collaborations get discussed. Principal investigators often mention upcoming multilateral calls before they formally open.

• If your lab already has an international co-author on a paper from a partner country, ask whether that connection could become the basis of a joint proposal.

What being on a project gets you

As a team member under a principal investigator's e-ASIA grant, you typically get funded time on the project, access to partner labs and equipment in another member country, and a structured reason to travel for fieldwork, sample analysis, or joint experiments. This builds the kind of international co-authorship and cross-border lab experience that is hard to get through a single-country grant alone.

Because funding and reporting run through your PI, your obligations follow your university's normal research assistant or graduate research rules, not e-ASIA JRP directly. Confirm with your supervisor and graduate school how project funding affects your stipend, your thesis timeline, and whether project travel counts toward your program's residency requirements.

Before you commit

Check the current call text for eligibility by country and field before assuming a project applies to you, since coverage changes call to call and not every ASEAN country has an active agency in every round. Confirm with your supervisor which national agency funds your specific role, since your reporting and compliance rules follow that agency, not JST or the general e-ASIA secretariat.

How e-ASIA JRP compares to other regional funding

e-ASIA JRP is one of several multilateral research funding mechanisms open to ASEAN-based researchers, alongside bilateral government-to-government science agreements and broader Asia-Pacific research networks. Its distinguishing feature is the co-funding structure, where each country pays for its own team rather than one agency distributing a shared pot, which means your eligibility and paperwork always run through your home country's participating agency first.

This structure matters when comparing it to programs like Erasmus+ or DAAD-funded collaborations, which are typically funded from a single European source even when the research team is international. If your field or target country is not part of an active e-ASIA call, ask your supervisor or your national research council about equivalent bilateral programs, since science cooperation agreements between individual ASEAN countries and partners such as Japan, Korea, or Australia often run in parallel to e-ASIA JRP.

Realistic expectations for graduate researchers

Joining an e-ASIA project as a graduate student usually means becoming part of an established research group's international work rather than driving your own independent project from the start. Expect your role to focus on a defined piece of the joint proposal, such as running experiments, collecting field data, or co-developing methods with your counterpart team abroad, under close direction from your PI and the partner-country collaborator.

This can still meaningfully shape your thesis if your supervisor structures your chapters around the joint project's goals from the beginning. Raise this directly with your supervisor before the proposal is submitted, so your specific contribution and any planned travel are built into the project plan rather than added on afterward.