DESY, with more than 2900 employees at its two locations in Hamburg and Zeuthen, is one of the world's leading research centres. Its research focuses on decoding the structure and function of matter, from the smallest particles of the universe to the building blocks of life. In this way, DESY contributes to solving the major questions and urgent challenges facing science, society and industry. With its ultramodern research infrastructure, its interdisciplinary research platforms and its international networks, DESY offers a highly attractive working environment in the fields of science, technology and administration as well as for the education of highly qualified young scientists.

Foundation models are multi-dataset and multi-task machine learning methods that once pre-trained can be fine-tuned for a large variety of downstream applications. The successful development of such general-purpose models for physics data would be a major breakthrough as they could improve the achievable physics performance while at the same time drastically reduce the required amount of training time and data.To further advance foundation models in physics, and to bring them towards application at high energy physics experiments, we invite applications for a research associate position on the topic of deep learning for particle physics.

The Cluster of Excellence “Quantum Universe” performs research to understand mass and gravity at the interface between quantum physics and cosmology. The research team includes leading scientists from mathematics, particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology at Universität Hamburg and DESY. Doctoral research associates will become members of the Quantum Universe Research School (QURS), which provides academic and soft skills training, as well as career planning support. In addition, they will receive individual budgets to facilitate the attendance of summer schools and conferences, and to support other educational measures. Additional travel money for project-specific duties will be provided by the hosting research groups. Doctoral research associates may participate in the organization of the Cluster via an early career council.