Open positions

PhD and postdoc positions (funded)

We are hiring new PhD students through the ELLIS PhD program to conduct research on Table Representation Learning. The positions are supervised by Madelon Hulsebos, and can be in the following directions 2) Mechanisms for Reliable Insight Extraction from Tabular Data, or 2) Models and Tools for Exploratory Statistical Data Analysis and Data Science (co-advised with Marine le Morvan). Applications are due 31 October. You can apply here, or reach out directly for an earlier start date!!

The PhD positions are based at CWI and will receive their degree from the University of Amsterdam. The ELLIS co-supervisor depends on the topic and can be discussed during the interview process. Both are fully funded 4-year positions with a gross monthly salary that increases from €3,059 in year 1 up to €3,881 in year 4. You will receive an extra holiday allowance (8%) and year-end bonus (8.233%), as well as 42 vacation days. More about the working conditions can be found here.

Master thesis projects (2026)

This year, we host master thesis projects on the following topics:

  • Contextual agentic data science pipelines (supervised by Effy & Madelon)
  • Failure modes in tabular data science agents (supervised by Effy & Madelon)
  • Robust open-domain insight extraction from tabular data (supervised by Daniel & Madelon)
  • Assessing generated insights from tabular data (supervised by Cornelius & Madelon)
  • New small-scale efficient text-to-SQL models (supervised by Cornelius/Daniel & Madelon)
  • Synthetic tabular data generation (supervised by Madelon)

We typically work with students from the University of Amsterdam, who will get a desk at CWI and will receive a small monthly allowance. Applications from UvA students can ideally be sent through the UvA’s thesis portal or to madelon@cwi.nl. We may make exceptions for talented students from other European universities with an exceptionally good background fit for a project, then you can send an email to Madelon as well.

Temporary collaborations

We also host highly motivated senior PhD visitors from foreign institutes, and research master students from Dutch universities. Please send an email with your CV and interest statement madelon@cwi.nl.

If you are an international ELLIS Honors bsc/msc student and want to visit us with support of the ELLIS MSc Hosting Program, please reach out to Madelon to align on a plan.