CYD Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellowships: A Talent Program for Cyber Defense Research (Switzerland)

It is intended to bring together basic and applied research skills and hence encourage new solutions to major challenges in the fields of cyber-security and data science.

The CYD Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships are open to researchers at doctoral and postdoctoral levels who are willing to engage with issues cutting across the frontiers of cyber-security and data science.

Aim

• The CYD Fellowships are designed to significantly increase research activities around the security chain by funding talented early-stage researchers in Switzerland. They seek to address some of the most challenging research and translational issues in cyber-defence by bringing together university-based researchers and cyber-defence stakeholders in Switzerland.

Goals

• Key goals of this Talent Program for Cyber-Defence Research include:
  • providing enhanced cyber security and privacy solutions, thereby reducing the asymmetry between attackers and defenders in cyber-defence;
  • accelerating the development of cyber solutions while taking into consideration the characteristics and needs of the technology industry and the operational ecosystem;
  • nurturing the next generation of top researchers in the cyber domain;
  • increasing the competitiveness of the Swiss cyber-defence community by leveraging synergies between the partners involved and testing new solutions within the Swiss cyber-defence research ecosystem.

Categories

• CYD Doctoral Fellowships: provide a salary and research and conference funds for four years (with a possible one-year extension), enabling CYD Doctoral fellows to complete a PhD thesis at the CYD Campus under the joint supervision of a professor at a higher education institution in Switzerland and a CYD Campus researcher.
• CYD Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowships: provide a salary and research and conference funds for up to two years, enabling CYD Postdoctoral fellows to complete a research project at the CYD Campus under the joint supervision of a professor at a higher education institution in Switzerland and of a CYD Campus researcher.

Priorities

• Special preference is given to projects that address one or several of the following fields:
  • 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

Funding Information

• A maximum amount of CHF 3’000 per year can be granted for research costs (only for specific equipment needed for the project, not general IT material), and a maximum amount of CHF 5’000 per year can be granted for conference costs.

Eligibility Criteria

• Talented researchers in cyber-defence at doctoral and postdoctoral levels are strongly encouraged to apply.
• Applicants must demonstrate that their project:
  • can significantly influence the research fields of security and data science and have significant impact on Swiss cyber-defence;
  • will bring together, in a collaborative effort, researchers from the CYD Campus and from at least one higher education institution in Switzerland.
• CYD Doctoral Fellowships: 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. Depending on the requirements of the host institution, applicants must be enrolled in the doctoral program either when they submit their Stage 2 application or at the start of the fellowship.
• CYD Postdoctoral Fellowships: Applicants are only eligible to apply if they will conduct their distinguished postdoctoral fellowship in a different laboratory from the one of their doctoral and (if applicable) of their current postdoctoral research.

For more information, visit Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne.