🚀 We are offering a fully funded PhD position on human-AI collaboration to support psychiatry research, jointly supervised by Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych (UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt) and Prof. Dr. Dr. Elisabeth Binder (Director, Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich). The position is embedded in the Max Planck School of Biomedical Artificial Intelligence (MPS-BMAI), which trains doctoral researchers at the interface of AI and the life sciences.
The project Psychiatry is rich in deep, multimodal data but poor in tools that let experts make sense of it together with AI. You will develop human-AI collaboration and machine-learning methods that help clinicians and researchers explore, integrate and interpret heterogeneous psychiatric data - and unlock the value of existing cohorts such as the BeCOME study (a deep-phenotyping study combining genetic, molecular, neuroimaging, actigraphy, neurocognitive and psychometric data to identify biologically-informed subtypes of stress-related disorders).
- Methods for multimodal data integration and exploration with experts in the loop
- Verification-first, interpretable AI that clinicians and researchers can trust
- Privacy-preserving and ethically grounded handling of sensitive clinical data
Your profile
- A Master's degree in Computer Science, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Data Science, Computational Neuroscience, or a related field
- Solid programming and ML skills; experience with multimodal, biomedical or NLP data is a plus
- Genuine interest in mental health and interdisciplinary, collaborative research
- Willingness to work across Darmstadt and Munich; very good English
What we offer
- A fully funded position - E13 employment contract, 36 months
- Joint supervision by two leading groups in AI and in psychiatry
- Access to unique clinical cohorts and the MPS-BMAI / ELIZA / ELLIS doctoral networks
- Strong compute, structured training, and an international, interdisciplinary environment
How to apply & timeline (Max Planck School - Cohort 0) This PhD is offered as a Cohort 0 position of the Max Planck School of Biomedical AIhttps://www.maxplanckschools.org/en/news-events/launch-of-the-max-planck-school-of-biomedical-artificial-intelligence. Cohort 0 candidates are nominated by a pair of primary and secondary supervisors - here, Prof. Gurevych (TU Darmstadt) and Prof. Binder (MPI of Psychiatry).
- Interested candidates: contact us as early as possible to be considered for nomination. An in-person meeting in September 2026 will help form supervisor-candidate pairs.
- Eligibility note: you may already be a PhD student in your first two years - the earlier the better - but the official Cohort 0 start falls within the December 2026 to February 2027 window
Apply: via https://careers.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/ by July 24th, 2026, quoting reference to this post. Review begins immediately and continues until the position is filled.