A fully funded 3-year PhD fellowship on explainable natural language understanding for a start in Spring 2026 is available in the Natural Language Understanding grouphttps://www.copenlu.com/ at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen as part of the ExplainYourself projecthttps://erc.europa.eu/news/erc-2021-starting-grants-results on Explainable and Robust Automatic Fact Checking. The position requires a Master’s degree. The successful candidate will be supervised by Isabelle Augensteinhttp://isabelleaugenstein.github.io/ and co-supervised by Pepa Atanasovahttps://apepa.github.io/. Read more about the position and apply herehttps://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx/?cid=1307&departmentId=18970&ProjectId=164789&MediaId=5&SkipAdvertisement=false by 31 October 2025.
The project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant, a highly competitive funding program by the European Research Councilhttps://erc.europa.eu/homepage, which supports the most talented early-career scientists in Europe with funding for a period of 5 years for blue-skies research to build up or expand their research groups.
In addition to the principal investigator, PhD students and postdocs, the project team includes collaborators from CopeNLU as well as external collaborators. Three PhD students as well as two postdocs have already been recruited as a result of earlier calls, and the project officially kicked off in September 2023https://www.copenlu.com/news/2023_09_explainyourself/.
Candidates interested in a start in Autumn 2026 instead can express their interest by applying to the ELLIS PhD programmehttps://ellis.eu/news/ellis-phd-program-call-for-applications-2025 by 31 October 2025, naming Isabelle Augenstein as a supervisor.
More information about PhD opportunities in the CopeNLU research group can be found herehttps://www.copenlu.com/news/phd-fellowships-for-start-in-spring-or-autumn-2026/. Informal enquiries can be made to Professor Isabelle Augenstein, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, e-mail: augenstein@di.ku.dkmailto:augenstein@di.ku.dk?subject=PhD%20position%20on%20Explainable%20Natural%20Language%20Understanding.
Isabelle Augenstein, Dr. Scient., Ph.D. Professor and Head of the NLP Section, Department of Computer Science (DIKU) Co-Lead, Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence
University of Copenhagen Østervold Observatory Øster Voldgade 3 1350 Copenhagen
augenstein@di.ku.dkmailto:augenstein@di.ku.dk http://isabelleaugenstein.github.io/