35 PhD Degree-Fully Funded at ETH Zurich, Switzerland

In recent times, cities have experienced an unprecedented period of flux, whether triggered by disruptive technology, political upheavals, emergent social trends or the ongoing global pandemic. These growing uncertainties have prompted cities to rethink land use and transportation infrastructure provision planned for the future. In this sense, adaptive planning proposes to cope with uncertainty by committing to a few short-term actions, leaving options open for the future and continually adapting by learning how uncertainty unfolds over time. The ETH and NUS have a new project “AMIL” within the Future Cities Lab – Global Research Programme (FCL-G) that aims to integrate mobility, land use and infrastructure into a resilient, adaptive system that responds to changing needs, through a three-pronged approach. First, social network surveys in Zurich and Singapore will monitor and examine the ‘drivers of change’, by assessing changes in social and economic activity. Second, novel transport modelling and simulation techniques will be developed that can handle the unique challenges posed by the ‘city in flux’, with dynamically adaptive land use and demand responsive transportation systems. Third, exploratory modelling, decision-making under uncertainty methods (e.g. real-options) and optimization methods will be employed to formulate adaptive plans that can respond to short-term and long-term change. The project will bring tools, insights, methods and procedures that can provide decision-support for planning across relevant scales of time and space. Simulation models and software tools will be developed in consultation with an expert panel of practitioners and policymakers, with a goal to enable adaptive planning, improve resilience to shocks such as COVID-19, and reduce misalignment of provision and emerging demand in the long-term. These learnings will be applied to a study of infrastructure corridors and urban development across intercity, city-wide and local scales in both Alpine and Southeast Asian contexts, with Zurich and Singapore as the main hubs under study. The project will be guided by regular stakeholder workshops in both contexts, and will produce a suite of open-source software tools and planning recommendations developed in collaboration with an inter-agency working group for adaptive mobility, land use and infrastructure.

In the framework of a Personalized Health and Related Technology (PHRT) project involving academic and clinical research partners, the PhD student will work with human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived forebrain cortical neurons as in vitro cell model system of ADHD. More specifically, you will characterize disease-induced effects in patient-derived neuronal cells to assess the efficacy and guide the application of pharmacological treatments. To this end, you will perform extracellular high-density microelectrode-array recordings to study the development of neuronal networks derived from patients with ADHD and matched healthy controls. You will develop software in MATLAB/Python to analyze and interpret large-volume data sets. Besides electrophysiological microelectrode-array recordings, several other methods, such as immunohistochemistry, confocal imaging, and patch-clamp measurements will be used to functionally characterize individual neurons and their contribution to activity in the network.

The Chair for Physical Chemistry of Building Materials of ETH Zurich has two openings for PhD positions in digital fabrication with concrete, specifically on material science issues. These PhDs are part of the 3rd phase of the Swiss National Science Foundation National Centre for Competence in Research – Digital Fabrication in Architecture, a large, multidisciplinary project aimed at researching opportunities to implement digital fabrication processes at large, architectural scales.

The Chair for Physical Chemistry of Building Materials has two openings for PhD positions in chemical admixtures for sustainable concrete. These PhDs are part of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and are run in collaboration with the Paul Scherrer Institute, where an additional PhD will be hosted.

Your work will be devoted to sandstone-water interactions from different perspectives with continuum models, discrete element models and experimentally using cutting-edge technology. You will start with established HTM models, adapt them to the material specifics that you experimentally obtain, and apply them in combination with FEM simulations. To assess the damage and its evolution, you will develop a Discrete Element approach with bonded particles and fluid and will determine damage evolutions under various climatic scenarios, that can be embedded in the FEM simulations to trigger fracture. Within the framework, you will simulate degradation and fracture formation under cyclic climatic loading which can be employed to address several open questions.

The project is centred on the proposition that urban pattern-process-function relationships provide valuable knowledge to advance the science of urban planning. The project builds upon emerging theoretical and empirical evidence that patterns of human settlement systems (urban patterns) shape social and ecological processes (urban processes), and such processes, in turn, dictate the key demands of urban living such as social relations, mobility, economic exchanges, biophysical environment, ecological conditions, etc. (urban functions). The project will investigate such pattern-process-function relationships across several cities to develop generalizations that can be used as urban planning and design principles to guide sustainable urban development, which will be tested in design studios. The main methods employed are remote sensing, spatial pattern analyses, data mining from global datasets, applications of mechanistic and empirical models, and statistical modelling for 5 key domains: urban climate, hydrology, biodiversity, public health and social-economic exchanges.

The Chair for Physical Chemistry of Building Materials has one opening for a PhD position on the topic of built heritage preservation focused on clay-bearing sandstones. This PhD is part of the collaborative ETH Grant “PROTECTING SANDSTONE MONUMENTS” which aims at improving the preservation of clay-bearing sandstone monuments. The selected student will collaborate with other PhD candidates funded in the scheme and will be employed at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering.

All our projects are interdisciplinary, touching on a different aspects of biocatalyst development. As an integral member of our team, you will be part of a recently approved European Training Network consisting of leading European Universities and Life Science-companies that are endeavouring to change the future of biocatalysis. Your project in particular will include finalizing and applying a recently developed cutting-edge high-throughput screening strategy for enzyme engineering, and use elements of molecular biology/molecular engineering, microfluidics, mass spectrometry, next generation sequencing, and enzyme technology. Project-specific workshops and trainings as well as secondments to other project partners will also help you to shape and drive your scientific project to successful results.

The reproduction of many plants is characterized by mast seeding, where boom and bust seed production years are correlated amongst individuals over large spatial scales due to their common response to a climatic trigger. Masting is thought to have evolved to foil seed predators, whose populations shrink during non-mast years when seed availability is low and cannot grow fast enough to consume all seeds during mast years, allowing some seeds to ‘escape’ predation. However, many seed predators are generalist, so that a dearth of seeds of by one plant species can be made up by high seed production of another species – unless masting is correlated among members of the same plant community. Moreover, the positive effects of high density at seed stages may be outweighed by negative competitive effects at seedling stages. Unfortunately, fully exploring these possibilities is difficult, as few studies consider masting in the context of an entire community, with multiple plant species and seed predators linked through seed predation, and few additionally follow the entire process of recruitment (from seed to successful seedling). 

Modern energy research has to deal with complex and integrated systems, characterized by large amounts of available data. Strategic energy planning problems are fundamental – and increasingly – uncertain, and models must inevitably rely on simplifying assumptions, inaccurate forecasts as well as limited or incomplete information. Recent research has shown that considering uncertainty can dramatically improve the resilience and robustness of decisions and plans drafted based on the outcomes of energy system models. Yet, for a range of reasons, spanning from methodological to practical limitations, uncertainty is to date very seldomly accounted for in energy research. This project will contribute to addressing these limitations, working towards the vision of a systematic consideration of uncertainty in energy systems and strategic decision-making models to enable a robust and timely energy transition.

The short-term effects of different diets on calf development have been documented in the past, but the long-term effects (‘nutritional programming’) of a specific diet on digestive physiology and susceptibility to health problems have not been studied much in ruminants so far. The project is led by Prof. Marcus Clauss (UZH) in cooperation with Prof. Paweł Gorka (the University of Agriculture in Krakow) and consists of at least one full year of experimental animal work (severity grade 1 on a scale from 0 to 3) with calves growing into cattle at the AgroVet Strickhof Facilities of the UZH and the ETH Zurich. There will be intensive interaction with the ETH Zurich’s Prof. of Animal Nutrition, Mutian Niu. The project is funded by the National Science Centre (Poland) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), and has the potential to change feeding recommendations for newborn ruminants.

The International Political Economy and Environmental Politics group is based both at the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS) and the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP). Its research and teaching focus on examining the role of citizens and consumers as well as national socio-economic and political conditions in providing solutions to transnational environmental and economic problems.

This doctoral researcher position on digitalization for a circular built environment is based at the Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture (CEA) and will be supervised in collaboration with the Chair of Innovative and Industrial Construction (IC) and the Chair of Construction Heritage and Preservation at ETH Zurich. We intend to foster the exploration and adoption of digital technologies as well as the shift towards a circular paradigm in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector. Buildings are complex problems addressed by numerous stakeholders. Automating reuse of materials in the built environment will connect actors across the value chain. Circular economy principles applied to the built environment through automated materials reuse can tackle challenges such as the scarcity of resources, waste treatment, and the climate crisis.

As a result of sharp increases in the age-dependency ratio and declining fertility rates in Europe, an influx of immigrants is expected in the following decades to sustain long-run economic growth. According to projections from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office for example, foreign immigrants are expected to account for more than 80% of Switzerland’s population increase over the next 30 years, with other EU countries like Germany and France following the same trend (Kohli et al., 2020). Yet, few countries in the EU have been successful in economically integrating migrants into the society.

You are expected to work towards a doctoral degree and participate mostly in the research and teaching activities of the group of Crop Science, but also in those of the DS3Lab. You will capture images in our field site at Lindau-Eschikon, 20 km away from Zurich, on a regular basis and you will interact with farmers and scientists conducting experiments there. The full-time position offers you an excellent opportunity to delve into the world of data science and crop growth modelling, and at the same time improve your practice-oriented knowledge of real-life agriculture. You will join an inclusive and supportive working environment that praises scientific curiosity and creativity.

You will be reponsible for designing mechanical, electrical, fluidic, and/or optical systems for the control and automation of biological systems for research. The position involves both hardware and software development. Prior background in biology is preferred, but not necessary.

Chemical admixtures are organic compounds, which when added in small amounts in concrete can profoundly modify key properties such as rheology and hydration kinetics. While already playing an essential role around the world in modern concrete, they are called upon to play an even greater one in low-carbon concrete. The SNSF Ambizione project aims to develop novel admixture formulations to enable low-carbon cement incorporating high amounts of supplementary cementitious materials (>50%) to be used in low-binder concrete formulations, enabling substantial CO2 savings. Such binders may be referred to as ultra-green cement and are seen as representing alternatives that could be easily, rapidly and extensively taken up by industry.

The design of lightweight and efficient machine components relies on the optimal placement of material for a given load case. In many real-world applications, the loads span multiple physical domains, including structural, thermal, fluid, and magnetic. Multi-material additive manufacturing provides the ability to locally vary the mechanical structure (e.g. lattices, topology optimization) and material properties within the component to achieve multiple design objectives. What is lacking is a set of tools that leverage this capability and can apply it to the optimization of parts. To accomplish this task, we seek a highly motivated and talented PhD candidate who will support us to develop new and to extend existing design tools to design multi-material components satisfying multiple physical objectives.

In this PhD thesis, a novel ab initio quantum transport solver will be developed to address these issues. It will take advantage of the always increasing computational power to offer physical models of greater accuracy than the existing ones. The focus will be on electronic transport and the interplay of electrons with other carriers, phonons, and photons. All these effects will be captured at the quantum mechanical level and from first-principles. To be able to leverage the already available exascale computing resources, a dedicated parallel programming model called DaCe will be exploited. It allows to express computations separately from data movements and automatically generates hardware-specific codes from programs written in a high-level scripting language, Python in the present case. The main task of this PhD thesis will therefore be to implement the required physical modules in Python, validate them, and apply them to the simulation of nanoscale devices. This work will be performed in close collaboration with other PhD students and post-docs who will concentrate on different aspects of this SNSF project.

Applicants for this PhD position are expected to have an excellent MSc degree in Chemical Engineering, Material Science, or Chemistry. Experience and knowledge in material synthesis and/or material structural characterization (especially with synchrotron-based techniques) are highly valued. We are looking for highly motivated, committed, and creative individuals, able to work in a team and with outstanding communication skills. Working in a top-level research environment with advanced laboratory infrastructure, the candidate will have a unique opportunity to develop their research abilities. The position is available from September 2022 onwards.

As a new member of the group, you are supposed to contribute to research activities in the group and gradually build your own independent research profile according to your interests. Successful candidates are expected to work towards a doctoral degree, and participate in the teaching activities of the group. The research group aims to increase the number of women in scientific positions. Female candidates are therefore encouraged to apply.

As a new member of the group, you are supposed to contribute to research activities in the group and gradually build your own independent research profile according to your interests. Successful candidates are expected to work towards a doctoral degree, and participate in the teaching activities of the group. The research group aims to increase the number of women in scientific positions. Female candidates are therefore encouraged to apply.