The AITHYRA- Joint International PhD Call in Molecular Medicine and Artificial Intelligence

CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, and AITHYRA, the new Research Institute for Biomedical Artificial Intelligence open a joint call for PhD students.

• Do you want to work in an environment that promotes free-minded scientific creativity, and translate your findings to impact medical practice and improve healthcare?
• Are you excited to gain a new understanding of the molecular physiology and pathology of humans?
• Do you want to join an international group of highly collaborative and successful colleagues that help you achieve your training and research goals?
• Are you a person who enjoys teamwork across disciplines and within a broader cultural and social context?

If yes, apply now for one of our 15-20 fully funded PhD positions here:

The next PhD Program, together with our partners the Medical University of Vienna, the CCRI St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute, the TU Wien, Uni Wien and AITHYRA, will start in September 2026. The goal of the PhD Program is to address real-world problems in inter-disciplinary computational, biomedical, clinical, and health research settings.

We offer:

• a highly interactive introductory program in a supportive peer-group environment
• supervision by a top scientist and support of the Faculty of either CeMM or AITHYRA
• a PhD degree awarded by the Medical University of Vienna, the Technical University of Vienna or University of Vienna
• a dynamic and highly multidisciplinary international research environment
• full access to state-of-the-art technologies
• a generous scholarship, which covers salary, all research costs, university fees, work-related travel expenses for 4 years
• Minimum gross monthly salary of EUR 2.779,60 paid 14 times a year (following the recommendations of the FWF)
• excellent employee benefits including full insurance coverage (health, accident, retirement), health care services, subsidized cafeteria
• a wide range of social, cultural, and sports activities organized by the institutes

You are:

• an exceptionally motivated PhD candidate with a keen interest in interdisciplinary teamwork and science that nurtures the precise, personalized, predictive and preventive medicine of the future
• excellent in writing and speaking English
• an early career researcher with research experience, presentation skills and a commitment to research integrity
• a candidate who holds, or will obtain by September 2026, a final degree in medicine, biology, chemistry, bioinformatics, computer science, engineering, physics, mathematics, or a closely related field. The minimum qualification required is a four-year Bachelor's degree with honours.

The research area

The 2026 CeMM PhD Program will focus on the thematic areas of infection, immunity, metabolism, cancer, rare diseases, network medicine, design chemistry, patient-derived organoids, bioengineering and ageing research. These areas are built on the pillars of genomics and proteomics, molecular and cell biology, epigenetics and genome integrity, bioinformatics, machine learning, systems biology, chemical biology and organic chemical synthesis,

high-throughput genetics and high content automatic imaging.

The program

Our goal is to enable and empower students with the ability to successfully design, execute, manage and explain a research project in modern molecular medicine, through a strongly participatory and interactive program. The program is conceptualized in three 'modes': collect, connect and contribute. These will guide you through scientific excellence in data generation and validation to responsible and professional scientific citizenship.

The host institutes

AITHYRA and CeMM are sister institutes with identical commitment to excellence, world-class standards, internationality, as well as mentoring and training, operating in a unique mode of super-cooperation. Biology is connected with medicine, experiments with computation, discovery with translation, and science with society and the arts.

The mission of CeMM
is to achieve maximum scientific innovation in molecular medicine to improve healthcare. At CeMM, an international and creative team of scientists and medical doctors pursues free-minded, basic life science research in a large and vibrant hospital environment of outstanding medical tradition and practice. CeMM's research is based on post-genomic technologies and focuses on societally important diseases, such as immune disorders and infections, cancer, metabolic disorders, and aging. The goal of CeMM is to pioneer the science that nurtures the precise, personalized, predictive, and preventive medicine of the future. CeMM is co-led by Maria Rescigno (Scientific Director) and Anita Ender (Administrative Director) located right at the heart of the Medical Campus Vienna, one of the largest in Europe, door-to-door with the Medical University of Vienna, the Vienna General Hospital (AKH).

The mission of AITHYRA
is to fundamentally transform biomedical science by embedding artificial intelligence as a co-pilot throughout the entire scientific process-from hypothesis generation and experimental design to biological interpretation and therapeutic innovation. Through a coherent integration of AI/ML across biological scales, the goal is to improve our understanding of the root cause of diseases, their diagnosis and the conceptualization of novel therapeutic strategies while inspiring new innovations in AI/ML. In order to create sufficient amounts of data to support AI applications, AITHYRA will invest in experimental automation through a robotics laboratory infrastructure. While this research program is broadly applicable in life sciences, the focus will be on cancer, immunology, infectious diseases and neurodegenerative disorders. AITHYRA is co-led by Michael Bronstein (Scientific Director for AI), Georg Winter (Scientific Director for Life Sciences), and Anita Ender (Managing Director) and is located at the Marxbox on the Campus of the Vienna Biocenter.

Vienna is repeatedly ranked as the world's best city to live in and is a United Nations city with a large international, English- speaking community. The official language at AITHYRA and CeMM is English, and 50 different nationalities are currently represented at the institutes.

For more information about applying to the PhD Program please visit the website:

Information session

At both 10:00 and 17:00 CET on 14th January 2026, CeMM and AITHYRA will host an online information event where you will be able to find out more about doing a PhD at the institutes and applying to the joint call as well as have the chance to meet and talk directly with current PhD students. Please sign-up here
PhD Open Day – CeMM
and or visit the PhD program page on the CeMM website.