PhD student in AI for plant gene regulation M/F

Doctorat / PhD Profil chercheur : Other Profession Type de contrat : Temporary Date limite de candidature : 4 Dec 2026 - 00:00 (Europe/Paris) Date de début : 1 Mar 2027 Programme UE : Other EU programme Domaine : Agricultural sciences » Other

Job type: not applicable (doctoral contract) Research unit (UMR): DIADE (IRD, CIRAD, University of Montpellier) Location: Montpellier – IRD centre, 911 avenue Agropolis Open to contract staff: fixed-term doctoral contract, 36 months About the employer An international French scientific research institute, IRD helps strengthen the resilience of societies in the face of global upheavals. It operates in more than 50 countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, as well as in mainland France and the French overseas territories. Its research responds in concrete ways to priority needs: climate change mitigation and adaptation, the fight against poverty and inequality, biodiversity conservation, access to healthcare, and attention to social dynamics. Research questions are designed with local stakeholders and communities. Teams combine perspectives, disciplines and knowledge through long-term partnerships. Together, they build robust, high-impact solutions. IRD champions research that benefits as many people as possible. It shares the results of its projects and puts science at the service of action. In this way, it supports the transformation of societies towards fairer and more sustainable social, economic and ecological models. The unit you will join The DIADE research unit (Diversity, Adaptation and Development of tropical plants; IRD – University of Montpellier – CIRAD) studies plant biodiversity, plant adaptation mechanisms and plant interactions with the environment. It explores plant development mechanisms to design new phenotypes needed in a context of climate change. To this end, the unit's teams combine a continuum of approaches, tools and methods: genome analysis, biochemistry, physiology, microscopy, modelling and data integration. The unit focuses on plants from tropical regions, where current challenges are greatest: exceptional biodiversity, strong population growth, sustained pressure on the environment and rising demand for crop production. The unit is mainly based in Montpellier, with field activities in Africa, Central and South America, and Asia. An attractive mission You will prepare a PhD thesis aiming to predict gene expression in plants. The project couples genomic language models with machine learning on gene regulatory networks (BioLLM-CRE project). Under the supervision of Pierre Larmande, IRD Research Director and thesis director, and co-supervised by Mikael Lucas, IRD Research Director and thesis co-director, your main activities will be: Build a reference dataset linking cis-regulatory elements to spatio-temporal expression profiles in Arabidopsis and rice. Evaluate genomic language models, both general-purpose and plant-specific, for expression prediction. Compare…