CYD Doctoral Fellowships will provide a salary and research and conference funds for four years (with a possible one-year extension), enabling fellows to complete a PhD thesis at the CYD Campus under the supervision of a professor at a higher education institution in Switzerland.
This program is highly competitive, and the primary evaluation criterion is excellence, as measured by academic records and professional accomplishments. Candidates applying for a CYD fellowship are expected to have excellent grade transcripts.
CYD Doctoral Fellowships are open to researchers at doctoral level who are willing to engage with cross-cutting issues in cyber-defence, with a particular emphasis on:
- Protection of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of cyber and cyber-physical systems
- Information sharing, data fusion and crowdsourcing
- Data science & AI methods for analysing cyber- and technology-relevant data
- Security, privacy and digital trust technologies.
- Citizens of any nationality may apply for the CYD Doctoral fellowships.
- No age restrictions apply.
- Applicants must be enrolled in a doctoral program at a Swiss higher education institution and have the endorsement of a professor employed in this institution willing to supervise them when they submit their Stage 2 application (see Selection process).
- Applicants may seek the endorsement of a professor employed at a school of applied sciences, but they must provide written confirmation at Stage 2 that they are simultaneously enrolled in a doctoral program at a Swiss university.
- Applicants may request funding for less than four years only if they have already completed the first two years of their doctoral program and the requested funding period coincides with the completion of their PhD thesis.
Eligible costs include and are limited to:
- Salary contribution (incl. social security benefits) based on the salary scale associated with the applicant’s position in the host institution.
- Research costs: A maximum amount of CHF 3’000.- per year can be granted for research costs (only for specific equipment needed for the project, not for general IT material).
- Conference costs: A maximum amount of CHF 6’000.- per year can be granted for conference costs.
Please read carefully the application guidelines.
Explore the Application toolkit.
All required documents must be submitted via the online submission platform.
All documents must be submitted in English.
NOTE: The documents currently available refer to the previous 8th call. The updated documents for the 9th call will be available when it opens in December 2023.
The 9th call will be launched in December 2023 and the submission deadline for Stage 1 (see Selection process) will be 23 February 2024 (17:00 CET).
The selection process includes two stages.
In Stage 1 the submitted applications will be evaluated by a CYD Campus internal committee chaired by the Director of the CYD Campus, based on the following criteria: the fit of the candidate with the CYD Campus and the fit of the candidate’s pre-proposal with the aims of the program.
Shortlisted applicants will be assigned a prospective CYD Campus mentor. This prospective mentor will interview the applicant to determine if he or she is willing to endorse the applicant for Stage 2. Only those applicants who are endorsed by their prospective CYD Campus mentor will be able to proceed to Stage 2.
In Stage 2, short-listed applicants will be required to submit a full research proposal by a given deadline.
Final decisions will be made by a committee chaired by the Director of the CYD Campus and composed of 3-5 members representing the CYD Campus and Swiss higher education institutions.