Call for applications to the Swedish National Graduate School in Medical Bioinformatics, 2025
To all current and prospective 1st year PhD students studying Bioinformatics,
We have decided that MedBioInfo, the Swedish National Graduate School in Medical Bioinformatics, will take applications for an incoming class in 2025. The deadline is 31 May, 2025.
MedBioInfo was established in 2017 to provide advanced training in bioinformatics to the next generation of world-class life-science researchers. If admitted you will join a competitively selected student community. Our 42 affiliated faculty members include most of the leading bioinformaticians in Sweden, and we also draw on the faculty of NORBIS, our Norwegian sister school. Alongside your peers, this will form a key part of your future scientific network. Our courses are short, worth 3 or 5 HP(ECTS). Most courses require a one-week at-home pre-assignment, one week in residence, and (often) a take-home one-week post-assignment. You would typically take two courses per year, for a total of 3 years. The courses are more specialised than can be provided by your home university. You will be matched with a faculty mentor, providing a perspective and advice complementary to that of your advisor. We also have an annual meeting where you will attend faculty talks and soft-skills workshops, present your research, network, and get feedback. Best of all, this should be fun.
You are eligible to apply if you began or will begin your PhD between January 2024 and July 2025, though there is flexibility in this. Target groups include PhD students in Life Science doing primarily computational research. Selection is based on scientific and technical aptitude.
However several things will change with respect to prior years. First, admission is now open to students at foreign universities, though you are asked to consider the climate, e.g. by aligning research meetings with courses. Second, though we have already stretched our original VR funding for an extra two years, we cannot do that forever and so this time are asking PIs of incoming students to pay a tuition fee of 20kSEK for the first year. If you are a PI, here are a few reasons why MedBioInfo is still a great deal:
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You get a full menu of Bioinformatics courses, delivered on a schedule made with your student in mind.
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No problem with prerequisites or courses being full, an admitted student is guaranteed a spot in all our courses. Even if they have a need to take courses out of sequence, they can usually still get a spot.
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No scanning the internet for courses, our students automatically receive an invitation for the next course in their program.
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Our teachers have been running their MedBioInfo course for up to eight years; yearly course evaluations and follow-up mean that quality is always improving.
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Our Admissions Committee, comprising Bioinformatics faculty from multiple Swedish universities, ensures that all our students are suited for computational coursework, and provides a distinction recognized by employers.
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It’s not just about courses, the networking is just as important. Our Annual Meeting is a time to share science with colleagues, gain soft skills, and also relax and catch up with friends.
Our host university will no longer be Stockholm University but rather the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. This will not affect our admissions, courses or other activities, as these were already catering to a mix of medical and non-medical students.
We take pride in our good gender balance, as well as inclusion in other aspects. To this end we have a policy of respectful dialogue in courses, seminars, and meetings.
Please keep on eye on our website for the dates of our first courses, “Applied Bioinformatics” and “Statistics in Bioinformatics”. Several of our core courses require programming in Python. If your Python background is weak, you will need to start strengthening your skills soon after admissions. There are many online courses, and we also recommend Shaw’s “Python 3 the hard way.”
In past years we have enrolled up to 30 students, though our minimum enrollment is 20 students. You should apply following the link https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/ef715409-0f7c-e25e-38e6-0c252bcdfd57 . Feel free to email Sam with any questions. We look forward to reading your application.
With kind regards,
Samuel Coulbourn Flores,
Dean of Students, MedBioInfo
Associate Professor in Bioinformatics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences