The University of Copenhagen’s Biology Department is offering a fully funded PhD fellowship in Microbiology. This exciting opportunity focuses on a cutting-edge research project exploring how bacteria and the viruses that attack them—called bacteriophages—constantly battle and evolve to outsmart each other.
Backed by the Carlsberg Foundation and other partners, this fellowship gives a promising early-career researcher a rare opportunity to join a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary project. The main goal is to find new and creative ways to fight antibiotic resistance—a serious and rising threat to global health.
The chosen candidate will take part in high-level research that brings together different areas of science. This offers a great learning opportunity and a chance to make a real impact in microbiology and public health.
Why This Fellowship Matters:
- Hands-on training with the latest tools and techniques in areas like gene science, protein studies, DNA sequencing, cell chemistry, metabolism research, and virus engineering.
- Access to world-class resources at the Faculty of SCIENCE, including modern labs, advanced imaging rooms, and powerful high-speed research tools.
- Opportunities to work abroad, with optional research visits to China, Switzerland, or Germany, depending on how the project progresses.
- Close support from lead researcher Dr. Yong E. Zhang, along with a growing team that includes two current PhD students and incoming postdoctoral fellows.
- Grow your career through courses (30 ECTS), teaching experience, attending conferences, and publishing in top scientific journals.
Requirements:
To apply, you should already have—or be about to finish—a Master’s degree in Microbiology, Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, or a similar field, with qualifications equal to 300 ECTS credits in Denmark. You’ll need strong practical lab experience, such as cloning and working with microbes, along with a solid grasp of how bacteria deal with stress, how viruses infect them (phages), and key concepts in molecular microbiology.
It’s a plus if you have experience analyzing omics data, know how to use R or Python for bioinformatics, and can show examples of scientific writing—like a thesis or published paper. Strong English skills, along with good problem-solving, organization, and teamwork abilities, are also expected.
Responsibilities and Skills Development:
You’ll design and carry out your own experiments, complete the required PhD courses, help with some teaching, share regular progress updates, collaborate with a partner institution, and write a PhD thesis based on research papers that can be published.