Short-term visits by PhD students

Marie-Curie Fellowships

• The EBI offers up to 18 short-term fellowships for PhD training in Bioinformatics, awarded by the European Commission's Marie Curie Host Fellowship for Early Stage Training.
• The scheme supports stays of between 3 and 6 months at the EMBL-EBI for students studying for a PhD or equivalent.
• Students must have completed their first year of their PhD studies.
• The fellowships provide stipends of €2000 (approx. £1350) per month.
• Students from all EU and associated member states (except EMBL students) are eligible to apply.

For further information, please see below:

  
• Eligibility
• EMBL-EBI
• EMBL-EBI Research and Service Groups
• Financial Support
• How to Apply

There are limited opportunities for undergraduate students to undertake summer projects at the EBI. Please review the research and service groups pages for information on each group’s area of focus. More information on short-term training opportunities can be found here.

Eligibility

The following criteria are required for eligibility:

• Nationality and Residence
  Applicants for fellowships must be nationals of a Member or Associated State (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia) or be able to provide proof of having resided in Member States for at least the last four years prior to their selection by the host.
  
  In this grant there are also a limited number of places for students normally resident in countries outside the EU and its associated states.
  
  
• Mobility
  The normal mobility rules for Marie Curie activities do not apply to international organisations, so the studentships are also open to PhD students from the United Kingdom. The only students excluded are those employed by EMBL and its outstations as the training must be carried out at the premises of a legal entity other than the one in which they normally work. Fellows may not carry out their fellowship in the country where they normally pursue their doctoral studies. As EMBL-EBI is considered an International European Interest Organisation, only students studying at EMBL , Heidelberg are excluded from applying.
  
  
• Qualifications
  The fellow would typically be pursuing studies for a PhD-level degree in a subject area similar to that of the Marie Curie Training Site. The stay must be directly relevent to the studies pursued. The stay at the Marie Curie training site must be recognised as an integral part of the studies as confirmed in writing by the supervisor of the doctoral studies in the home university.

  The successful applicants will probably have completed at least one year's doctoral research in their home institution and have a track record of excellence in their academic career.

EMBL-EBI

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is an Outstation of EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory). The EBI provides a first-class, highly interdisciplinary environment in which research and service provision are closely interwoven. With its collaborative research and involvement with coordinated efforts to collect and disseminate biological data, the EBI holds a prominent position in bioinformatics on a global scale. It has particularly close contacts with European industry. The EBI is located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, 11 miles south of Cambridge, which it shares with the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute.

EMBL-EBI Research and Service Groups

• Rolf Apweiler and Ewan Birney: PANDA Group - The Protein and Nucleotide Database Group (PANDA) is a large group providing all the sequence resources at the EBI, from DNA through to Protein... more
  
  
• Paul Bertone: Bertone Group - This group's research lies in the genomic analysis of developmental pathways, with a particular focus on differentiation and lineage commitment in mammalian embryonic stem cells... more
  
  
• Alvis Brazma: Microarray Group - Using microarray technology to analyse the sequence data from the genome projects to identify which genes are expressed in a particular cell type of an organism... more
  
  
• Paul Flicek: Vertebrate Genomics - focuses on functional annotation of the genome including methods for incorporating high-throughput epigenetic data for expanding and understanding the collection of human variation... more
  
  
• Nick Goldman: Goldman Group - is developing methods for the analysis of DNA and amino acid sequences to study evolution... more
  
  
• Henning Hermjakob: Proteomics Services Team - The team provides databases and tools for the deposition, distribution and analysis of proteomics and proteomics-related data... more
  
  
• Wolfgang Huber: Huber Group - The group's research focuses on the following: Gene transcription and protein-DNA binding analysis with DNA microarrays, Statistical Computing and High throughput cellular assays and genetic interaction screens... more
  
  
• Nicolas Le Novère: Computational neurobiology - Main goal of the group is to build realistic models of neuronal function at various levels, from the synapse to the micro-circuit, based on the precise knowledge of molecule functions and interactions (Systems Biology). Those models will provide a deeper understanding of neuronal signalling, and will help to reproduce neuronal disorders in silico... more
  
  
• Nick Luscombe: Regulation Group - The group focuses on gene expression and genomic analysis... more
  
  
• Sarah Hunter: Interpro Team - The Interpro team is responsible for the development and maintenance of the InterPro project. InterPro is an integrated documentation resource for protein families, domains and functional sites, and is used for small and large-scale functional classification of proteins... more
  
  
• Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann: Rebholz Group - The group focuses on text mining, this is the extraction of facts from scientific literature in molecular biology. The main methods are based on Finite State Automatons (FSAs). In the past we have worked on the identification of protein-protein interactions, acronyms and descriptions of mutations... more
  

• Christoph Steinbeck: Steinbeck Group - Our research in molecular informatics focuses on the understanding of the small-molecule metabolism of living organism, including methods for computer-assisted structure elucidation of biological metabolites... more
  
  
• Peter Stoehr: Literature Services Group – We work on collecting and integrating scientific literature resources from multiple repositories. Among others this involves high-throughput web mining, document re-engineering and information retrieval. More..
  

• Janet Thornton: Thornton Group - Has a wide range of research interests. Using biomolecular structures they are obtaining an understanding of enzyme active sites, protein-protein interactions, protein-ligand interactions, protein-DNA interactions and structure and modelling... more
  
  
• Weimin Zhu: Database Applications Group - The Database Applications Group consists of software engineers from the Sequence Database Group, and database professionals from the Database Support Team, which belongs to the EBI IT Service Group. The group mandate is to provide support to software and database development for new projects, and maintenance support for the projects in production. The group is continually conducting research in software engineering and database technologies, in order to meet new requirements from user community, and to find better solutions to the challenges in areas such as solid application framework, data integration and best practices.
  
  

Financial Support

How to Apply

• Full C.V. which must include:
1. Age
2. Nationality
3. Address
4. Email address
5. Marital status
6. Dates of degree awards
• Outline of the suggested project, including in which group they would like to undertake their fellowship training and proposed dates
• 2 full academic references.

Candidates are advised to discuss possible projects with EBI group leaders before a final application is submitted.

Send applications to the following address:

Personnel
EMBL-EBI
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge CB10 1SD
UK

Tel:+44 1223 494440
Fax:+44 1223 494470
Email: Click here