OPPORTUNITIES

We are always excited to hear from passionate and driven scientists! If you're interested in joining our team, please reach out via email—there may be open opportunities waiting for you.

Open Call: deadline 8th November

PhD Position – Decoding spatiotemporal cues in metastasis using multi-omics and imaging approaches

Host: https://www.imaigene-lab.com/  (supervised by Dr Alieva & Dr Olmeda), Institute for Biomedical research IIBM-CSIC/UAM), Madrid, Spain
Program: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (SpaXio)
Duration: 4 years · Funding: EU MSCA Doctoral Network · Apply here: https://www.spaxio.eu/recruitment-and-projects/application

🔬 About SpaXio

The EU-funded MSCA Doctoral Network “Spatial Crosstalk in Immune-Oncology” (SpaXio) is now recruiting 14 PhD students to decipher how the tumor microenvironment promotes metastasis in colon and breast cancer.

SpaXio brings together leading cancer researchers across Austria, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Spain, combining spatial multi-omics, organoid models, advanced imaging, and AI-driven data integration. Each doctoral project offers an interdisciplinary training environment bridging cancer biology, systems medicine, and artificial intelligence.

💻 Project 9 – Decoding Spatiotemporal Cues in Metastasis Using Multi-Omics and Imaging Approaches

Significance:
Understanding how cancer cells interact with and remodel their microenvironment is key to identifying therapeutic targets and predicting metastatic progression. By combining high-resolution live-cell imaging with computational morphodynamic analysis, this project captures a new “omic” dimension—cellular behaviors in real time, including shape, movement, and interactions.

The candidate will develop computational pipelines to analyze how immune and stromal cells behave in metastatic environments, and how these behaviors are shaped by mutations and treatments such as radiotherapy. By integrating imaging data with clinical and metabolomics datasets, the project will provide a comprehensive, quantitative view of cell states and their functional consequences.

Open-access tools, pipelines, and datasets generated by the candidate will empower the broader scientific community to study immune–tumor dynamics, reveal mechanisms of treatment response and resistance, and guide the design of more effective, patient-specific therapies.

Your Role:

• Build scalable, end-to-end workflows for segmentation, tracking, and classification of single-cell behaviors.

• Quantify immune cell motility, interactions, and cytotoxic activity across diverse experimental conditions.

• Integrate imaging features with other omics and clinical datasets.

• Design user-friendly software interfaces and visualization tools so that complex data can be explored interactively by researchers.

• Ensure that all tools are open-source, reproducible, and optimized for high-throughput analysis.

We’re Looking For:

• Master’s degree in bioinformatics, mathematics biomedical engineering, physics, computer science, artificial intelligence, or a related discipline.

• Excellent communication in English.

• Strong Python programming skills.

• Experience or interest in computer vision, machine learning, or data integration.

• Experience in software development and building interactive user interfaces (e.g., dashboards, web apps, notebooks).

• Analytical, creative, and independent thinking.

• Passion for open science and making tools widely accessible.

This project will be carried out in Madrid (Spain), supervised by Alieva and Olmeda, within the ImAIgene Lab (https://www.imaigene-lab.com/ ), at the Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas Sols-Morreale (IIBM-CSIC/UAM). https://www.iib.uam.es/en/

🌍 Eligibility (Marie Curie Mobility Rule)

Applicants must not have lived or worked in Spain for more than 12 months during the 3 years immediately before recruitment.
The program is open to candidates of any nationality and particularly encourages international applications.

💶 Funding and Benefits

• 4-year full-time PhD contract under the EU MSCA Doctoral Network scheme (competitive salary + benefits).

• Access to state-of-the-art imaging facilities, computational resources, and network-wide training events.

• Secondments and collaborations with leading European cancer research centers.

• Specialized training across Europe

📥 How to Apply

Submit your application via the SpaXio portal:
👉 https://www.spaxio.eu/recruitment-and-projects/application