Jocelyn Schaad
Recruiting Manager

In this exciting PhD project, you pioneer neuro-symbolic methods that retain the mechanistic grounding of classical phylogenetics, and that integrate the representational richness of genomic large language models (gLLMs).

School: Life Sciences and Facility Management
Starting date: or upon mutual agreement

Your role

Genomic sequences are modeled as evolving along binary phylogenetic trees through stochastic string‑valued substitution and insertion‑deletion (indel) processes. Given a set of present‑day sequences, classical inference problems in phylogenetics are: (i) homology inference (ii) tree inference, and (iii) ancestral sequence reconstruction. A central focus of our recent work has been to develop fast frequentist indel‑aware approaches to these problems.

For tractability, the models in most cases must assume that residues evolve independently across sites. In reali...