About us

The University of Oldenburg has been awarded 22.5 million euros from the Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK) and the Volkswagen Foundation from the “Strategic Development of Potential” funding line to strengthen its research profile and its national and international competitiveness through the project "A Programme for Excellence. Developing Strengths and Building Potentials by Interdisciplinary and International Networking".

The programme promotes international networking, supports students and early-career researchers, and strengthens interdisciplinary research in socially relevant and innovative fields.

The positions are part of the MWK-funded project “AI Incubator in Medicine”. The positions are intended to support early-career researchers in pursuing doctoral qualifications. Applicants who already hold a PhD and wish to further develop their research profile are also welcome to apply.

Your tasks

Medical AI Foundation Models

Medical AI foundation models are large-scale, pre-trained models used in healthcare, diagnostics, and biomedical research. Trained on diverse datasets, these models can integrate and reason over multimodal medical data, such as imaging, clinical text, and physiological signals, thereby enabling flexible adaptation across a wide range of clinical tasks. Within the paradigm of physical AI, these models serve as a unifying intelligence layer for systems operating in real-world healthcare environments, with embodied AI systems, including healthcare robots, being a key example. They enable context-aware perception, reasoning over patient-specific data, and execution of actions guided by high-level natural language instructions.

Key research topics, in collaboration with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), include interactive machine learning, explainability (XAI), transparency, fairness, and robustness.

Your profile

Requirements:

Applicants should hold an MSc in computer science, mathematics, or a related discipline. Experience with state-of-the-art machine learning for image analysis, multimodal information extraction, vision-language models, and/or human-in-the-loop machine learning is expected. Experience with deep learning frameworks for image analysis or AI methods for health and wellbeing applications would be an advantage. Successful candidates are expected to develop excellent scientific writing skills. They will also present scientific findings and implement demonstration systems for user evaluations and project deliverables.

We offer

• An excellent opportunity to advance foundational research in applied AI for medicine
• Excellent opportunities to continue your personal and professional development
• Close collaboration with national and international partners from both academia and industry
• A multidisciplinary team of around 25 researchers and engineers that works on closely related topics and is highly visible in related international research communities.

Our standards

The University of Oldenburg is dedicated to increase the percentage of female employees in the field of science. Therefore, female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. In accordance to § 21 Section 3 NHG, female candidates with equal qualifications will be preferentially considered. Applicants with disabilities will be given preference in case of equal qualification.

Further information

School II – Computing Science, Business Administration, Economics, and Law of the University of Oldenburg offers a modern, interdisciplinary academic environment in which technical, economic, and societal perspectives are brought together. Within this faculty, the Department of Computer Science stands for research-intensive and practice-oriented academic education.
The position is based in the Chair for Applied Artificial Intelligence led by Professor Sonntag.

The opportunity for personal academic qualification (doctoral degree) is provided and explicitly supported!

Contact

For further information, please contact ( ).

Apply now

Please send your application via e-mail by 15.09.2026 to

Applications should be submitted as a single PDF with reference “AAI-005-MWK“ and should include a full CV, copies of certificates and contact details for two academic referees, and the earliest possible starting date. Applications must be received by 15 September 2026, 5:00 pm GMT.