Jobs

VIB International Ph.D. Program in life sciences

Are you interested in bioinformatics, evolutionary biology, or evolutionary genomics? You've come to the right place!

We are a young and dynamic research group interested in bioinformatics and evolutionary and comparative genomics and are continuously looking for interested, motivated, and hard-working students that would like to join the group.

You can find more information on the topics we work on throughout our website and we suggest you to just browse around.

If you'd be interested in joining our group as an undergraduate student (to do a master's thesis), or as a PhD student, or a postdoc, just contact Yves Van de Peer, or one of the people in his group. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

Work Environment

• Choose a supervisor whose work you admire and who is well supported by grants and departmental infrastructure.
• Take responsibility for your project.
• Work hard : long days all week and part of most weekends. If research is your passion this should be easy, and if it isn't, you are probably in the wrong field. Note who goes home with a full briefcase to work on at the end of the day. This is a cause of success, not a consequence.
• Take some weekends off, and decent holidays, so you don't burn out.
• Read the literature in your immediate area, both current and past, and around it. You can't possibly make an original contribution to the literature unless you know what is already there.
• Plan your days and weeks carefully to dovetail experiments so that you have a minimum amount of downtime.
• Be creative : Think about what you are doing and why, and look for better ways to go. Don't see your PhD as just a road map laid out by your supervisor.
• Develop good writing skills : they will make your scientific career immeasurably easier.
• To be successful you must be at least four of the following: smart, motivated, creative, hard-working, skillful and lucky. You can't depend on luck, so you should better focus on the others!

We'd like to add one more thing to the list:

• It's better to burn out than to fade away. Neil Young

If the above sounds good to you & you'd like to join our group, contact Yves Yan de Peer.

Below are some pictures of our offices inside the FSVM building to give you an idea of what kind of environment to expect..