Funded Ph.D. Positions at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (CLS)

[cls coordinator]

Apply to do your Ph.D. at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (CLS), a research center between ETH Zurich, Switzerland and the Max Planck Society, primarily the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany. We are currently accepting applications to join our program in 2026.

CLS doctoral fellows are co-supervised by one advisor from ETH Zurich and one from the MPI for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart / Tuebingen, the MPI for Informatics in Saarbruecken or the ELLIS Institute Tübingen. Each CLS fellow has a primary location (chosen based on interests and match) and conducts a mandatory 12-month exchange at the other location. All CLS Ph.D. fellows register as graduate students at ETH Zurich and, upon successful completion of their Ph.D. project, will be granted a doctoral degree by ETH. Fellowships are fully funded. The program language is English. 

Faculty participating in this call (*only available as co-advisor for the one-year exchange):
Zurich: Andreas Krause, Benjamin Grewe, Christian Holz, Daniel Razansky, Fanny Yang, Florian Doerfler*, Gunnar Raetsch, Hedan Bai, Lars Lindemann, Marc Pollefeys, Menna El-Assady, Mrinmaya Sachan, Niao He, Richard Hahnloser, Robert Katzschmann, Siddhartha Mishra, Siyu Tang, Stelian Coros, Thomas Hofmann, Valentina Boeva*.
Stuttgart/ Saarbruecken/ Tuebingen: Antonia Georgopoulou, Antonio Orvieto*, Bernhard Schoelkopf, Bernt Schiele, Buse Aktaş, Celestine Mendler-Duenner, Christian Theobalt, Christoph Keplinger, Jonas Geiping*, Konstantin Rusch, Maksym Andriushchenko, Maximilian Dax, Michael Muehlebach, Moritz Hardt, Philipp Mueller, Rediet Abebe, Renate Sachse, Sahar Abdelnabi, Shiwei Liu, Wieland Brendel.

Applicants should have a strong interest in doing basic research in areas such as:
Bio-inspired /Bio-hybrid Robotics, Biomechanics, Causal Inference, Computational Biology, Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Control Systems, Deep Learning, Digital Humans, Earth Observation, Educational Technology, Efficient AI, Explainable AI, Graph Representation Learning, Haptics, Human-Computer Interaction, Human-Robot Interaction, Imaging Technology, Machine Learning, Medical Informatics, Medical Robotics, Natural Language Processing, Neuroinformatics, Optimization, Perceptual Inference, Probabilistic Models, Reinforcement Learning, Robotics, Safety, Security and Privacy, Scientific Machine Learning, Smart Materials, Social Questions, Soft Robotics, Statistical Learning Theory, Visual Analytics.

Applicants must further hold or expect to hold an excellent degree at Masters level in a relevant subject. Good written and spoken English is essential. We value diversity at our institutions. If you feel that you meet our requirements, we encourage you to apply. 

Apply via our online application portal at https://learning-systems.org/apply.
The application deadline is midnight (23:59 CET) on November 5, 2025.