To all current and prospective 1st year PhD students studying Bioinformatics, 

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, with the support of 42 Bioinformatics faculty, 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. Alongside your peers, this will form a key part of your future scientific network. Most courses are worth 3 or 5 HP(ECTS), 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.

The host university will no longer be Stockholm University but rather the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. This will not greatly affect admissions, courses or other activities, as these were already catering to a mix of medical and non-medical students. However a few 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, our current Director has left me his duties, but will remain as a University Representative. Lastly, we have already stretched our original VR funding for an extra two years, and cannot continue that forever, so this time are asking PIs of incoming students to pay a yearly tuition fee, currently 20 kSEK. If you are a PI, here are a few reasons why MedBioInfo is still a great deal:

• You get a full menu of Bioinformatics courses, delivered on a schedule made with your student in mind.
• 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.
• No scanning the internet for courses, our students automatically receive an invitation for the next course in their program.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 the MedBioInfo 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 using the application form (EUSurvey). 

Feel free to email me,  Samuel Coulborn Flores, samuel.flores@scilifelab.se, with any questions.

We look forward to reading your application. 

With kind regards, 

Samuel Coulborn Flores, Docent