PhD Opportunities in Linguistics in Switzerland

The University of Zurich is advertising more than 25 fully funded PhD positions across a broad range of research areas. The opportunities are based in Zurich, Switzerland, and are offered as paid positions rather than as a single scholarship programme. Fields represented in the listings include life sciences, medicine, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, astrophysics, and the social sciences and humanities. The breadth of the call may suit applicants seeking doctoral research in biomedical an...

This PhD project is part of VERTICAF (Vertical Africa: Visualizing Urban Change, Negotiating Power, Designing Sustainable Cities) , a comparative research initiative on urban verticalization in African cities. Based at EPFL Lausanne and linked to partnerships with the Universities of Dakar, Kigali, and Luanda, the project examines how cities in Africa are changing through vertical growth and what this means for urban futures. The doctoral researcher will focus on developing and applying methods ...

ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich, invites applications for two doctoral researcher positions in the SNSF-funded project “From Homes to Habitats – Swiss Housing Cooperatives as Agents of Socio-Ecological Transition.” The project investigates how housing cooperatives in Switzerland can support more sustainable ways of living. It moves beyond their established role in providing affordable housing to examine innovative social, spatial, and ecological practices a...

The Rhine AI research group, led by Prof. I. Bogunovic in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel , is offering a PhD opportunity in the post-training of diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs). The SNSF-funded project, “Foundations of Post-Training for Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models,” investigates how post-training can improve the reasoning capabilities of dLLMs. These models represent an emerging alternative to standard autoregressive l...

ETH Zürich is offering a fully funded PhD position in glaciology and glacial hazards through the Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW) and the ICEFAL Project. The research focuses on cold hanging glaciers in the French and Swiss Alps, investigating how climate warming affects glacier stability and ice-avalanche risk. The doctoral project combines high-altitude fieldwork with glacier modelling and geospatial analysis, providing an interdisciplinary research environment at the i...

The Rhine AI research group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Basel, invites applications for a fully funded PhD position in post-training diffusion language models. The project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is titled “Foundations of Post-Training for Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models.” The successful candidate will develop reinforcement learning methods for post-training large diffusion-based language models, investigate reasonin...

The University of Zurich's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences offers PhD study in two linguistic subjects: Linguistics and Computational Linguistics and Phonetics . The unified Linguistics subject covers German, English, Romance, Slavic, and Comparative Linguistics, including Indo-European Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and other linguistic fields and subfields. Students interested in computational linguistics and/or phonetics pursue the combined subject Computational Linguistics and Phonetics...

The Hermann Paul School of Linguistics (HPSL), a collaboration between the University of Basel and the University of Freiburg, invites applications for the Hermann Paul Scholarship in Linguistics 2026/2027. This doctoral scholarship is based in Basel, Switzerland, with the doctorate commencing between 1 March and 1 April 2027. The programme supports research in German Linguistics, Ibero-Romance/Spanish Linguistics, and English Linguistics. Doctoral candidates join an international, inter-univers...

The Hermann Paul School of Linguistics (HPSL), jointly connected with the University of Basel in Switzerland and the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg in Germany, offers one Hermann Paul Scholarship for a PhD candidate based in Basel. The successful candidate may start between 1 March and 1 April 2027. The PhD project may focus on English Linguistics, German Linguistics, or Ibero-Romance/Spanish Linguistics. Candidates will join an internationally recognized, inter-university graduate progra...