CS PhD Roundup — July 13, 2026

Coverage window: July 6, 10:33 a.m. to July 13, 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. This is a triage-heavy week. The new ETH Zurich PhD lead has a direct application page, but it needs an advisor-fit caveat because the named PI is Hans Gersbach at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute and the listing says the role will be co-supervised by an unnamed computer science professor. 1 The other two new leads, TU Darmstadt and KAUST Vision-CAIR, are not decision-ready because their public pages do not establish a complete deadline plus application route. 2 3 4

For applicants with limited time, the calendar still matters more than the new-lead count: Inria WILLOW closes July 17, ETH Zurich's oncology-reasoning postdoc closes July 19, and the University of Twente computer-vision PhD closes July 20. 5 6 7

Candidate scan

Priority	Opening	Research fit	Status and timing	Applicant action
Apply if the caveat fits	ETH Zurich, PhD Researcher in Trustworthy and Human-Centred AI Development	Trustworthy AI, human-AI interaction, LLM evaluation, tool use, RAG, and democracy applications	Deadline July 31, 2026; applications reviewed on a rolling basis; start August or September 2026. 1	Use the ETH application page; note that the named PI is an economics professor and the CS co-supervisor is unnamed. 1
Watch only	TU Darmstadt, postdoc lead in computer vision and machine learning	Computer vision, unsupervised learning, explainable AI, image and video analysis	Deadline unavailable; specific job ID unavailable. Simone Schaub-Meyer's DBLP profile supports advisor verification. 2	Do not treat this as application-ready until a TU Darmstadt posting with a job ID, deadline, and materials list is visible.
Watch only	KAUST Vision-CAIR, postdoc lead in vision and AI	Zero-shot learning, vision-language work, few-shot learning, creative AI, affective AI	Current deadline unavailable; a specific aggregator page exists, while the official Vision-CAIR opportunities page did not provide usable application details. 3 4	Verify the current application route before spending time on a full package; KAUST is also outside the European-institution pattern used by recent issues. 3

New candidate details

Trustworthy AI / human-AI interaction: ETH Zurich PhD

Advisor and institution: Prof. Hans Gersbach at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich; the listing says the PhD will be co-supervised by an unnamed computer science professor. 1
Role type: PhD Researcher, 100%, fixed-term; the initial term is 18 months and can extend to 4-5 years. 1
Research direction: Trustworthy AI for high-stakes settings, with work on reliability, security, human-AI interaction, LLM-based voting assistants, supported democracy, LLM evaluation, prompting, tool use, and retrieval-augmented generation. 1
Deadline or status: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, with a July 31, 2026 deadline; the expected start is August or September 2026. 1
Application route or contact: Apply through the ETH Zurich jobs page. 1
Required qualifications: The listing emphasizes hands-on work with LLM evaluation, prompting, tool use, and RAG; a separate completed qualification checklist was not available. 1
Caveat: Gersbach is an economics professor with no CS top-venue DBLP record in the stated advisor caveat, and the CS co-supervisor is not named in the listing. 1

Computer vision / explainable AI: TU Darmstadt postdoc lead

Advisor and institution: Simone Schaub-Meyer at TU Darmstadt; her DBLP profile is available under her name. 2
Role type: Postdoc lead; a specific TU Darmstadt job ID was not available. 2
Research direction: Computer vision, unsupervised learning, explainable AI, image analysis, and video analysis. 2
Deadline or status: Deadline unavailable.
Application route or contact: Unavailable as a specific position link.
Required qualifications: Unavailable.
Caveat: Treat this as a watch item, not an application target. A usable entry still needs a direct application page, deadline, required materials, and eligibility details.

Vision-language / creative AI: KAUST Vision-CAIR postdoc lead

Advisor and institution: Mohamed Elhoseiny at KAUST Vision-CAIR; his DBLP profile is available under Mohamed Elhoseiny 0002. 8
Role type: Postdoc in vision and AI. 3
Research direction: Creative and continual learning, with related work in zero-shot learning, vision-language methods, few-shot learning, creative AI, and affective AI. 3
Deadline or status: Current deadline unavailable; the posting appeared on aggregators around July 9, 2026, but a direct first-party application route was not confirmed. 3 4
Application route or contact: Unavailable from the official Vision-CAIR opportunities page used here. 4
Required qualifications: Unavailable.
Caveat: This is not ready for a full application workflow until the current deadline and application channel are verified; the location is also outside the European scope that has shaped recent issues. 3

Deadline and status scan

Action tier	Opening	Deadline or status	Role and research fit	Application route / contact
Apply first	Cordelia Schmid, Inria WILLOW, Paris	Deadline July 17, 2026; page remains live and accepting applications. 5	PhD on structured ego-world models for dexterous robot learning, including 3D/4D geometric grounding and cross-embodiment transfer. 5	Apply through Inria offer 2026-10180. 5
Apply first	Michael Moor, ETH Zurich D-BSSE, Basel	Deadline July 19, 2026, with the listing reserving the option to extend the window. 6	Postdoc on multimodal reasoning models for oncology, including LLM-based clinical decision support, tool-augmented inference, process supervision, and RL post-training. 6	Apply through the ETH jobs portal; contact mmoorlab@gmail.com is listed. 6
Apply first if CV-only venue fit is acceptable	Nicola Strisciuglio, University of Twente	Deadline July 20, 2026, Europe/Amsterdam time; the role remains open. 7	Fully funded four-year PhD on compositional learning for data-efficient vision foundation models, with work on object-attribute compositionality, bias detection, machine unlearning, and priors. 7	Apply through the Academic Positions listing; venue caveat: the PI check shows CVPR and ICCV coverage but no NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR record in 2022-2025. 7 9
Next fixed deadline	Benoit Sagot and Rachel Bawden, Inria ALMANaCH, Paris	Deadline July 30, 2026; status remains open. 10	Three-year PhD on measuring and improving metalinguistic abilities of LLMs across phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and typologically diverse languages. 10	Apply through Inria offer 2026-10228. 10
Next fixed deadline	Integreat, University of Oslo and UiT The Arctic University of Norway	Deadline August 9, 2026; online information session July 22, 2026, 19:00-20:00 CEST. 11	Eight PhD fellowships in knowledge-driven ML, including Bayesian inference, logic and knowledge representation, LLM data attribution, VLM bias, machine reasoning, multi-agent knowledge bases, probabilistic representation learning, and structured VLMs. 11	Apply through Jobbnorge and rank at least one and up to three projects. 11
August deadline	Efstratios Gavves, University of Amsterdam	Deadline August 20, 2026; both the PhD and postdoc listings remain open. 12 13	PhD on mechanism-informed world models and postdoc on physics-informed world models, both tied to agents, planning, physical knowledge, and transfer across embodiments. 12 13	Apply through the UvA PhD page or the UvA postdoc page. 12 13
Changed deadline	Melih Kandemir, University of Southern Denmark, ADIN Lab	Deadline changed from August 31 to September 1, 2026; the two-year postdoc remains open. 14	Postdoc on neuromorphic reinforcement learning, with deep RL, probabilistic modeling, spiking neural networks, theoretical guarantees, adaptive robotics, and embodied AI. 14	Apply through the SDU Oracle HCM page; the listing requires at least two first-author papers at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or AISTATS. 14
Rolling	Charlotte Bunne, EPFL AIMM Lab	Rolling; two 100% postdoc positions remain open, with an ideal fall 2026 start. 15	Biological foundation models, multimodal learning, agentic interfaces, and translational applications in drug discovery. 15	Apply through the EPFL careers page. 15
Rolling	Christoph Lampert and Francesco Locatello, ISTA	Lampert's postdoc page remains open and was last updated in June 2026; Locatello's group page still says multiple PhD and postdoc positions are available. 16 17	Lampert: trustworthy ML, transfer learning, continual learning, meta learning, LLM security, and neuro-symbolic AI; Locatello: causal discovery, causal representation learning, dynamical systems, visual reasoning, and AI for science. 16 17	Lampert postdoc applicants should contact chl@ist.ac.at; Locatello postdoc applicants should contact Francesco.Locatello@ist.ac.at, while PhD applicants use the ISTA PhD route. 16 17

Not active application targets

The CopeNLU University of Copenhagen PhD and postdoc round tied to Isabelle Augenstein and Pepa Atanasova closed on May 31, 2026, and the cited pages do not present a new July 6-13 opening. 18 19 CISPA Burkholz remains a strong research-group watch item, but it should not be treated as an application-ready PhD or postdoc listing because the public group and profile pages do not provide a deadline, application link, required materials, or funding details. 20 21

Applicants who can only prepare one or two packets this week should start with the July 17 Inria WILLOW PhD and the July 19 ETH oncology postdoc. 5 6 The ETH trustworthy-AI PhD is worth evaluating next only if the economics-plus-unnamed-CS-supervision structure fits the applicant's risk tolerance. 1

Cover image: AI-generated editorial illustration.