Mitacs Accelerate: How an Industry Research Internship Funds a Graduate Degree

What Mitacs Accelerate Funds

Mitacs Accelerate connects your graduate research to a problem an outside organization actually needs solved. Your faculty supervisor and a partner organization, a company, hospital, non-profit, or municipality, agree on a project. You do the research as part of your degree, and the partner gets a working relationship with your lab plus a say in the direction of the work. The program runs through Mitacs , a national not-for-profit that funds research partnerships between Canadian universities and industry.

How the Funding Splits

Money moves in fixed units, not as one lump grant. One unit covers 4 to 6 months of your time on the project. Grad students and postdocs get different unit sizes.

The partner has to put its share up front before the internship starts, and Mitacs matches it dollar for dollar.

Where the Money Actually Goes

Of a $15,000 grad student unit, you receive a minimum $10,000 stipend or salary for your work on the project. The remaining amount, up to $5,000, covers research costs like materials, travel to the partner site, or equipment tied to the project. Postdoc units follow the same split at a higher dollar figure: a minimum $15,000 stipend plus up to $5,000 in project costs, out of the $20,000 total.

You can stack multiple units on the same project. Mitacs allows internships to scale from an initial 4 or 6 months up to 5 years total, so a multi-year PhD project can draw on several Accelerate units as it develops, as long as the partner keeps renewing its contribution.

What the Industry Partner Commits To

A partner is not just a funding source. Under the program's terms, the organization has to supervise you on-site during the internship, join monthly status meetings on the project, and give you roughly half your working time on their problem. This structure means Accelerate projects run closer to applied research than a typical thesis, since a real organization is tracking progress and expects results it can use.

Who Can Apply

You need to be a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident, or an international student with valid study status, enrolled as a graduate student at an eligible Canadian institution, or a postdoc within 5 years of finishing your PhD. Your faculty supervisor also needs to qualify for Tri-Agency funding (the standard eligibility bar used by SSHRC, NSERC, and CIHR). The partner organization has to be Canadian-based, and for-profit partners must contribute private-sector money rather than another government grant.

What Kind of Project Qualifies

The project needs a genuine research question tied to your degree, not a consulting task dressed up as research. It has to produce something the partner can use: a prototype, a data analysis method, a process improvement, a clinical protocol. Because a partner is paying for it, projects that stay purely theoretical with no application outside your thesis are a harder fit for Accelerate than for a standard scholarship.

How to Apply

You do not apply cold to Mitacs. The application has four practical steps: identify the intern, supervisor, and host institution together, develop a research plan with your academic supervisor and the industry partner, work out intellectual property terms between your institution and the partner before you submit, then file through the Mitacs Accelerate Registration and Application Portal (RAP). Submit at least 8 weeks before your planned start date, or 16 weeks if the internship involves international travel.

Mitacs reviews complete applications in about 6 to 8 weeks on top of that lead time, and invoicing to the partner happens once the application goes in, so the partner's financial commitment needs to be locked in before you submit rather than after.

Which Disciplines Fit

Accelerate is not limited to engineering or computer science. The program covers projects across every discipline, including health sciences, business, and the humanities and social sciences, as long as the work produces something a partner organization can genuinely use. A partner in the arts or social sciences might want user research, policy analysis, or program evaluation rather than a physical prototype, but the same funding structure and partner-commitment requirements apply regardless of your field.

Age and Status Requirements

You need to be at least 18 years old to hold an Accelerate internship, on top of the citizenship, residency, or valid study visa requirement. This rules out the program for undergraduate research assistants in most cases, since Accelerate is built around graduate-level and postdoctoral research capacity rather than early undergraduate work.

Intellectual Property Comes Up Early

Because a paying partner co-funds the work, intellectual property ownership gets negotiated as part of the application, not after the project produces something useful. Your institution's research office typically handles this negotiation alongside the partner, covering who owns a resulting prototype, dataset, or process, and what publication rights you keep as the graduate student who did the work. Raise IP questions with your supervisor and research office early rather than assuming your thesis rights work the same way they would on an unfunded project.