At the Hector Fellow Academy you get the opportunity to realize a self-developed research project under supervision of Hector Fellow Prof. Thomas Lengauer.* The Hector Fellows are a community of outstanding professors from different research institutions across Germany. They have been honored by the Hector Foundation for their merit in research and teaching within natural sciences, informatics, mathematics, medicine / psychology and engineering. At the Academy they pass on their expertise to prospective young scientists.
Your profile
You are enthusiastic about developing and investigating an innovative research idea within the discipline of Prof. Lengauer? You have a master’s degree in a scientific or engineering subject with excellent grades? You stand out from your peers due to your strong commitment and independent work? You are team oriented and communicative? You are willing to change your place of residence to Saarbrücken?
Our offer
Our PhD students are employed as full-time research assistants at the Max Planck Institute of Informatics, Saarbrücken for a period of three years. The salary is determined by the institute’s guidelines (according to the general pay scale of German universities approx. 47,000 EUR gross income per year). In addition, Hector Fellow PhD students receive grants for research expenses (15,000 EUR per year) and are given the opportunity to gain interdisciplinary expertise and relevant soft skills by participating in selected training activities.
Your application
Apply with your innovative, high-quality research proposal via our Application Portal. Next application period: August 1st - October 31st, 2016 Further information regarding the application process and the Hector Fellow Academy is available on www.hector-fellow-academy.de.
Woah - this is an incredible PhD project. A student doing this gets paid more than triple what I get paid as a Freiburg Max Planck PhD. They also get five times more money for research expenses. Oh wait, no, sorry, thats per year. They'd get twenty times more money for research expenses! That kind of funding dramatically changes the sorts of research outputs you can realistically generate as a PhD. I'd go one step further and say it would dramatically change the whole PhD experience. Where as other PhDs are rubbing together pennies to buy coffee and begging rich relatives to buy them server time on AWS, someone with this sort of funding can be going to workshops, giving presentations, licensing software that would otherwise be out of reach... it's a total game changer. And by the sounds of it, this isn't even your typical pet bioinformatician role!
I have no affiliation with the Saarbrücken MPI or Prof. Lengauer, but if I was looking for a Bioinformatics PhD, this would be a the top of my list. In fact just the mere knowledge that such PhDs exist and are out there has brightened up my day. I wish whomever takes this on the best of luck!! :)
Is this opportunity also for postdocs?