European MSCA Doctoral Network PhD Scholarship (DC12) – SPRING University of Cyprus in Cyprus

PhD scholarship in Digital Twins, critical infrastructure resilience, and AI at the University of Cyprus. The KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus is offering one full-time MSCA Doctoral Candidate position as part of the European Doctoral Network SPRING (2026–2030), focused on resilience experts for future large-scale critical infrastructures.

The selected doctoral researcher will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and work under the supervision of Prof. Mathaios Panteli and Prof. Demetrios Eliades. Research will advance Digital Twin technology for interconnected critical infrastructures, with emphasis on scalability, interoperability, cascading failures, real-time data integration, anticipatory self-adaptation, explainable AI, formal methods, knowledge engineering, and human-interpretable diagnostics. The project targets energy, water, and transportation systems and aims to develop reusable intelligent software agents for resilience-as-a-service.

SPRING is an international consortium combining universities, research institutes, and non-academic partners. Doctoral candidates will benefit from structured training, international mobility, secondments, and validation studies grounded in real-world use cases. The broader research environment at KIOS is highly interdisciplinary and internationally recognized, with strong expertise in ICT, monitoring, control, management, and security of critical infrastructures.

Funding and benefits: the scholarship includes a competitive monthly gross living allowance of €2,845.92, a mobility allowance of €689.99 gross per month, and a possible family allowance of €481.05 gross per month if eligible, together with social and health insurance and University of Cyprus tuition fees. The scholarship is offered for a minimum of three years, subject to annual performance evaluation.

Eligibility highlights: applicants may be of any nationality, must not already hold a doctoral degree, and must satisfy the MSCA mobility rule. A bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, or a related field is required, together with strong preparation in systems and control, cyber-physical systems, modelling, simulation, and scientific programming. Excellent English proficiency is required. Experience with machine learning, optimization, formal methods, distributed systems, digital twins, cyber-physical security, ontologies, or research software is considered an advantage.

Application deadline: 16 October 2026 at 05:00 (Europe/Athens), with rolling evaluation until the position is filled. Applicants must submit materials through both the UCY recruitment portal and the SPRING application form.