Anthony Hall

[4-year Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership PhD studentship with tuition fees paid, a stipend of £21,805 per year (2026/27 rate), and a Research Training Support Grant of £5,000 per year.] PhD opportunity at the University of East Anglia and the Earlham Institute on Designing Plant Gene Expression with Explainable AI . This studentship sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, plant genomics, and engineering biology, asking whether explainable AI can discover DNA design rules that control when, where, and how plant genes are switched on. You will join Earlham Institute’s AI for Biology group led by Professor Ke Li , with complementary support from Professor Anthony Hall and Dr Carolina Grandellis through plant genomics and biofoundry expertise. The project benefits from a highly collaborative research environment, access to advanced technical platforms for building large-scale foundation models, and training in AI methods, reproducible software, FAIR data management, and experimental design. The research will focus on designing compact libraries of cis-regulatory modules , assembling them into a standard reporter system, and testing them in potato protoplast assays . Both successful and unsuccessful designs will be scientifically valuable because they will reveal which AI-derived rules are biologically meaningful and where the models fail. This is a 4-year funded PhD studentship under the Norwich Research Park Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership. Funding includes tuition fees, an annual stipend of £21,805 (2026/27 rate), and a Research Training Support Grant of £5,000 per year . The project is based at the Earlham Institute , a BBSRC research centre of excellence in genomics, engineering and computational biology, and AI. Eligibility: applicants should hold at least a UK-equivalent Bachelor’s (Honours) degree at 2:1 level. An English language requirement applies: IELTS 6.5 overall with 6.0 in each component . Deadline: 30 November 2026. Start date: 1 October 2027.