Open positions

Long-term & funded research positions

We have two open positions for PhD researchers to start in Fall 2025 or Winter 2025/2026:

  1. PhD on Responsible Mechanisms for AI-Powered Data Analysis
    2. Tabular data analysis is an emerging specialization of AI-powered systems in the form of, for example, agentic systems or abstract pipelines, but research has shown that existing AI-powered data analysis frameworks are extremely brittle. If successful, though, such systems can uncover high-value insights from structured data that prevails in governments, humanitarian organizations, enterprises, and healthcare. The anticipated research will focus on developing mechanisms for "responsible" (responsible in a broad sense) AI-powered data analysis systems. This can involve research questions from NLP and AI, human-computer interaction such as interpretability and interfaces, and ethics and regulation, but also be focused on applications such as data preparation, etc. Interest in making positive societal impact is desired.

  2. PhD on Fundamental Techniques for Table Representation Learning
    3. High-capacity neural models, such as transformers, have been pivotal for establishing general-purpose models for a wide variety of natural language tasks. Despite successful adaptations for structured data, our research has identified shortcomings for fundemental properties of tabular data. This research will focus on exploring fundamental techniques for tabular-native models. This can involve, for example, studying new model architectures, serialization methods, and tokenization techniques, among others. A strong interest and background in AI and NLP are desired.

Both are fully funded 4-year positions with a gross monthly salary that increases from €2,884 in year 1 up to €3,801. 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 at: https://www.cwi.nl/jobs/terms-of-employment. Both PhD students will be co-advised with professors from the University of Amsterdam, and will receive their degree from the same university.

If you would like to apply for any of these positions please send an email titled “Application PhD position” with your CV, grade list, and motivation to madelon@cwi.nl. Send an email titled “Inquiry PhD position” if you have specific questions about the research direction, lab or logistics. A masters degree is required, but we might be able to make an exception if you have completed a 4-year undergraduate program in a top university. In that case, please reach out before applying!

Temporary collaborations

We also host highly motivated senior PhD visitors from foreign institutes, and (ELLIS) 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 collaborate and visit us with support of the ELLIS MSc Hosting Program, please reach out to Madelon to align on a plan.