Interested in doing a project with the NLP lab? Browse our list of available projects, or reach out directly by e-mail to:
lonneke.vanderplas@usi.ch
or one of the PhD students in the lab.
Please attach your CV and transcript and include [Masters Project] or [Masters Thesis] in your subject heading. Looking forward to collaborating with you!
(Note: if you want to propose your own project (which should share at least some similarities with the projects currently on offer), please contact the supervisor first to see whether they would be open to it.)
We are excited to announce two fully funded PhD positions in the USI NLP Lab, led by Prof. Lonneke van der Plas, as part of SATURNA, a large-scale Swiss National Science Foundation project. The project brings together expertise in NLP, graph deep learning, knowledge-enhanced AI, computational biology, and translational science from several institutions, such as Uni Bern and EPFL.
The PhD students 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. Our lab is a lively and international community, with students enrolled at both USI and EPFL, and members coming from many different origins, cultures, and academic backgrounds, which shapes the way we ask research questions, exchange ideas, and support each other as a team.
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 modelling RNA sequences, while the other will focus on interpretability: probing what these models learn, how they encode structure, regulation, and function, and what this can reveal about the underlying grammar of RNA biology.
The positions are based at USI Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. Lugano is a beautiful city surrounded by mountains and Lake Lugano, offering an inspiring setting for research, collaboration, and everyday life.
Applications received before 15 June 2026 will be given priority, but the positions will remain open until filled.
Apply here: official call (PDF)
For more information about the positions, please contact Prof. Lonneke van der Plas at lonneke.vanderplas@usi.ch and include PHD-SATURNA in the email subject.
Currently, there are no open postdoctoral positions available.