PhD position in the field of Confidential High Performance Computing for AI in Cancer Care (100%)

The High Performance Computing (HPC) research group (led by Prof. Florina M. Ciorba) in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel (Switzerland) invites applications for a PhD position funded by the SNF Bridge Discovery project “Family Gene Toolkit: A digital service to support genetic care in Europe” (grant number 237643).

The BRIDGE Family Gene Toolkit project unites three applicants: Prof. Maria C. Katapodi (Nursing, University of Basel), Prof. Maria Caiata-Zufferey (Social Sciences and Health Issues, SUPSI), and Prof. Florina M. Ciorba (High Performance Computing, University of Basel), and 14 clinical partners across Switzerland.

The project aims to advance the Family Gene Toolkit (FGT) v2.0, a digital platform that offers reliable information and prepares families concerned with Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer (HBOC) and Lynch Syndrome (LS) for clinical consultation and shared decision-making, while helping clinicians organize long-term care and monitoring. FGT v3.0 will integrate technological advancements with AI to enhance personalization for patients and improve clinical efficacy.

The PhD candidate will build the secure technical foundation for FGT 3.0: confidential HPC pipelines, scalable training infrastructure, and fine-tuned medical LLMs trained on clinical guidelines, evidence-based datasets, and real-world medical corpora. These models will be rigorously evaluated using established medical and multilingual benchmarks.

The ideal candidate has a background in AI, security, and/or high performance computing, with clear motivation to apply security, privacy-preserving, and efficient computational methods to AI for genetic healthcare.

Start: April 2026.
Duration: 4 years (48 months).

Application / Contact

Submit a single PDF file containing:

• Curriculum vitae, including a publication list (with open-access links, if available)
• Bachelor’s and Master’s theses
• If available, at least one relevant publication (with a brief statement of justification for its selection)
• Transcripts for Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees
• Links to examples of personal software contributions
• Motivation statement briefly addressing the questions:­

1. Why are you applying for this position?
2. What aspects of the project interest you?
3. Which prior experiences best prepare you for this research?
4. What do you aim to achieve during the PhD?

• Contact information for 1-2 professors willing to provide recommendation letters (please do not include the letters at this stage)

Applications are encouraged before 18 January 2026. Evaluation begins 19 January 2026 and continues until the position is filled. Short-listed applicants will be contacted within three weeks to arrange an interview. Due to the anticipated volume of applications, notifications are sent only to short-listed applicants.

For specific questions, contact Prof. Florina M. Ciorba (florina.ciorba@unibas.ch).