Two PhD positions in machine learning / spatial transcriptomics / biophysics

Friday 31st October 2025

Contact Email for the Job Positing philipp.berens@uni-tuebingen.de
Organization University of Tübingen
Location Tübingen, Germany
Title Two PhD positions in machine learning / spatial transcriptomics / biophysics
URL www.hertie.ai/data-science
Closing date Nov 23, 2025
Description We are hiring two PhD student for machine learning projects about (1) spatial transcriptomics in the retina and (2) using biophysical modeling to understand energy consumption in the retina!
In project (1), we want to better understand how neurons in the retina change their function and genetics over time. During your PhD, you will develop novel probabilistic models for cutting-edge data acquired in collaboration with Thomas Euler and Shahar Alon. As an ideal candidate, you are curious about open questions in neuroscience, and passionate about using your datascience skills to merge these data with previous datasets across modalities (Calcium imaging, spatial transcriptomics, single-cell transcriptomics) to get to novel insights about the retina and the visual system.
https://jobs.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/Job/6816/PhD-student-in-bioinformatics---machine-learning
In project (2), we want to use biophysical modeling to understand energy consumption in the retina and integrate the resulting models with a deep reinforcement learning framework! The project will allow you to work with cutting-edge differentiable simulator for understanding principles of neural coding. This PhD is part of a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation-funded iRTG "limits2vision" (https://limits2vision.net/) between University of Tübingen and Université Paris-Sorbonne.
https://jobs.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/Job/6831/PhD-student-computational-neuroscience---biophysics---machine-learning
Both post will be filled as soon as possible.