What are we looking for?

Dynamic young individuals ready to take an active part in the ESO R&D projects with a good deal of team spirit, curiosity and eagerness to learn.

What are we offering?

• An engineering PhD Studentship of 1 to 3 years;
• An international, multi-disciplinary environment, situated on the Garching science campus close to Munich, Germany, next to the best German universities, world-renowned research centres and 2 recent Nobel prizes;
• Working in collaboration with ESO's partner institutes and high-tech industries in the ESO member states;
• Three observatories at the forefront of ground-based astronomy and of technology: La Silla, Paranal and ALMA. And one of the most challenging telescopes under construction: the Extremely Large Telescope;
• An attractive remuneration package and support for relocating families.

Current ESO active R&D projects:

• Advanced visible and infrared detectors for astronomical instrumentation (modelling, testing, development of CMOS fast detectors, curved detectors...);
• Adaptive optics and related components including laser guide stars, deformable mirrors, wavefront sensing, tomographic techniques, interactions with segmented mirrors...;
• System simulation and modelling including deformable mirrors, telescope seeing effects, exposure time calculators, instruments, model-based system engineering;
• Optical metrology and photonics for (sub-)micrometric large structure characterisation, interferometry;
• Mechanics and cryogenics;
• Real-time computing;
• Machine learning applied to various topics (documentation management, data reduction, predictive control etc.).

For more details and a list of PhD subjects see the following https://www.eso.org/sci/activities/fellowships-and-studentships/engstudentfellow/phd-abstracts.html#par