Funding success for training and research into biological systems

Funding has been received to create an international partnership to undertake training and research to understand biological complexity.

The School of Physics and Astronomy has been awarded €4.5M of funding from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions to coordinate an international doctoral network. The network will consist of 12 European universities and research centres along with a number of non-academic partners.

Known as ‘Coherent Analysis Framework for Emergence in Biological Systems’, or ‘CAFE-BIO’ for short, the network will recruit and train fifteen doctoral candidates, each gaining a distinct theoretical perspective on complex biological systems.

Doctoral training

A notable feature of the programme is that each doctoral candidate will collaborate with researchers from two different academic institutions, combining previously separate techniques in innovative ways.

Also, each institution will lead on different problems inspired by biological systems. For example, one group, led from Barcelona, will develop new models capable of describing the full complexity of living matter, incorporating interactions that are absent in traditional condensed matter systems. A second group, led from Leiden, seeks to develop reliable methods to determine how such interactions play out macroscopically and govern an organism’s function. Finally, a group led from Warsaw will apply state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to aid the design of predictive models of complex biological systems. 

The cumulative effect of these endeavours will be to create a framework, firmly grounded in physical principles, that can be applied systematically to understanding the numerous forms of biological complexity.

Doctoral Candidates will also benefit from training provided by several non-academic partners, including University of Edinburgh spin-out Dyneval.

Recruitment

Recruitment for the fifteen positions will open in February 2026 with PhD research commencing in autumn 2026.

Partner institutions

This collaboration builds on a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, Georg-August Universität Göttingen and the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (also in Göttingen) that was supported by the government of Lower Saxony and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Further universities and research centres included in the partnership are:

• CEA Saclay
• CNR Rome
• Dioscuri Centre, Warsaw
• TU Eindhoven
• University of Barcelona
• University of Leiden
• University of Luxembourg
• University of Stuttgart
• VU Amsterdam

Non-academic partners include:

• Bacteromic (Poland)
• Dyneval Ltd (UK)
• Indiscale GmbH (Germany)
• Netherlands e-Science Center