Two fully funded PhD positions in the USI NLP Lab, led by Prof. Lonneke van der Plas, as part of SATURNA (https://www.saturna.ch/), a large-scale Swiss National Science Foundation project.
The successful candidates will work on developing and understanding transformer-based language models, their traditional application to languages and the challenges that their application to RNA sequences brings. One position will focus on new training methods and architectures for modeling long distance relations, segmentation, structure etc. , while the other will focus on interpretability: how these models encode structure, regulation, and function.
The PhD students are based at USI UniversitĂ della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, and will join a fast-growing, vibrant, and interdisciplinary research environment spanning the Institute of Argumentation, Linguistics and Semiotics (IALS) and the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), with close connections to collaborators across Switzerland and abroad including experts in graph deep learning, knowledge-enhanced AI, computational biology, and translational science from several institutions, such as Uni Bern and EPFL.
Applications received before 15 June 2026 will be given priority, but the positions will remain open until filled.
More information and application link here: https://content.usi.ch/sites/default/files/storage/attachments/ials/ials-idsia-phd-saturna-2026.pdf
Learn more about our lab here: https://usi-nlp.github.io/
Postdoc position opening soon!