PhD position in semantic data integration project

The database group of Leipzig University (Prof. Dr. Erhard Rahm) 

is looking for a strong Ph.D. candidate to work on new approaches for

semantic, ontology-based data integration, especially for biomedical 

applications.  A main focus will be methods to automatically determine  

semantic annotations (i.e., links to ontologies)  and adapt them after 

the underlying ontologies evolve. The new methods will be 

applied and evaloated for different kinds of real-word datasets, 

including electronic health records or clinical questionnaires. 

 

The position is available in the context of the project ELISA 

(Evolution of Semantic Annotations), which is funded by the German 

Science Foundation (DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and 

performed in cooperation with a research partner in Luxembourg.  

Furthermore, we cooperate with the medical faculty of Leipzig 

University which has a large collection of clinical questionnaires 

and related data that can be used for evaluating the 

annotation approaches. 

 

The requirements of the position are the following:

 

- Master’s degree in computer science or related discipline 

   (e.g., bioinformatics) 

- strong knowledge of database and (semantic) web technology

- strong programming and software engineering skills, 

   especially in Java 

- excellent writing and communication skills 

- strong interest in research and scientific work 

- interest in interdisciplinary work and biomedical applications. 

 

The position will be available for three years, starting from January 

2016 and will allow the candidate to work towards obtaining a 

PhD degree at the end of the project . The salary is according to the 

university pay scale. Depending on the qualification it can be compensated 

by up to level TV-L 13 (100%) which amounts to about 3.500 EUR per month 

(pre-taxes). Working language of the project will be English, knowledge 

of German is not mandatory, but a plus.

 

Leipzig University was founded in 1409 and is now a modern university 

of about 30.000 students. The computer science department is  located in the

new campus in the city center. There are several research groups working 

on data integration and semantic web technologies. Furthermore Leipzig 

University is a main part of ScaDS Dresden/Leipzig, one of two German 

centers of excellence for Big Data, codirected by Prof. Rahm.   

 

 

To apply, please send a full CV and letter of motivation (in one PDF 

document) to Prof. Erhard Rahm

(<mailto:rahm@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>) 

by November 15th, 2015. 

 

For informal inquiries, please contact Prof. Rahm or 

Dr. Anika Groß (<mailto:gross@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>)