PhD in NLP for Climate & Disaster Risk (Socioeconomic Impacts of Climate Extremes) Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Germany

The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, Germany, is offering a fully-funded Marie Curie PhD position focused on the application of natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) to climate and disaster risk research. This opportunity is part of the CLIMES Doctoral Network, which aims to train doctoral researchers in integrating climate science, data science, risk assessment, and social sciences to address the impacts of climate extremes.

The successful candidate will develop benchmark datasets on the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of floods, droughts, storms, and heatwaves in Europe and Africa since 1950, using multilingual peer-reviewed literature and other textual sources. The research will involve training language models to identify and quantify uncertainty in reported impact claims, producing confidence scores for risk modeling, and extracting causal factors from text data. The project emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration, with mandatory international secondments in Greece and Switzerland, and participation in a vibrant cohort of early-career researchers.

Applicants should have a Master's degree in a relevant field such as geography, computational social sciences, computer science, climate science, environmental science, environmental engineering, water resources, or digital humanities. Experience with scientific programming (Python or R), large datasets, NLP, text mining, and machine learning is highly valued. Candidates must not have resided, worked, or studied in Germany for more than 12 months in the past 36 months and must not already hold a PhD. Proficiency in English and the ability to work both independently and collaboratively are required.

The position is fully funded for 36 months under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Work Programme, with remuneration according to the programme's standards. The UFZ offers excellent supervision, integration into international research networks, and a supportive environment for international researchers. The application deadline is 20 March 2026. For more information and to apply, visit the UFZ career portal or contact the supervisors, Mariana Madruga de Brito and Taís Carvalho.

Keywords: natural language processing, climate extremes, disaster risk, socioeconomic impacts, multilingual text mining, machine learning, climate science, environmental science, risk modeling, Europe, Africa.