One fully funded postdoc position in NLP, for two years, renewable for another 2 years at the USI NLP Lab, in Lugano, Switzerland, as part of the SATURNA project.
SATURNA (https://www.saturna.ch/) is a large-scale four-year project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It is an inter-disciplinary collaboration between the University of Bern, EPFL, Idiap Research Institute and the National University of Singapore, with specialists in NLP, graph deep learning, knowledge-enhanced AI, computational biology and translational science.
The role of the team at USI is to draw parallels between text sequences and RNA sequences, thereby leveraging advances made in the NLP field to learn informative representations of RNA sequences. Vice versa, handling the intricacies of RNA, such as extremely long-distance dependencies, context-dependency, structure, function etc. sheds new light on assumptions made in NLP models, that will be tested for their applicability on language.
The postdoc will work under the scientific supervision of Prof. Lonneke van der Plas (https://usi.to/bkks) and will be offered the possibility to work in a fast-growing, cross-institutional, dynamic research team. The postdoc is expected to collaborate with the PhD students in the USI NLP lab that are working on a wide variety of topics in NLP, both at USI and the EPFL, as well as with the researchers in the SATURNA project, that includes work on interpretability and foundations of transformer-based language models, and benchmarking these.
Screening will start on July 13th 2026, 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-ids...https://content.usi.ch/sites/default/files/storage/attachments/ials/ials-idsia-postdoc-saturna-2026.pdf?_gl=1*1msdzem*_gcl_au*NTI1MjEzNjk1LjE3NzYwNjQwNjguMTMxMTEyNzU0NC4xNzgxMDE4ODEyLjE3ODEwMTg4MTE.*_ga*Nzg0NDY0OTY5LjE3NTE5NzY1MzQ.*_ga_89Y0EEKVWP*czE3ODMzNDI1NDkkbzMyMiRnMCR0MTc4MzM0MjU1NCRqNTUkbDAkaDE3NzM2ODYzMjU.
-- Prof. Lonneke van der Plas Associate Professor of Natural Language Processing USI Università della Svizzera italiana https://usi.to/bkks