Doctoral studies at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) are organised to cross traditional subject boundaries, and is common to the whole department.

The basic principle is that each doctoral student carries out thesis work within the laboratory (i.e. the research group) to which he or she belongs. Courses that are part of the doctoral education should consist of a number of courses selected from the range offered by the department, including master’s courses.

Where appropriate, courses can also be selected from those offered by other departments. Within the department, doctoral education is available not only within its core subjects in the Faculty of Science and Engineering (computer science, computer systems), but also within an increasing number of interdisciplinary fields of which the subjects computer science or computer systems are components.

The availability of several paths of doctoral education with individual study plans reflects both the possibility of specialisation of field of study and thesis work, and the different compositions of prior knowledge that these interdisciplinary fields require.

The doctoral education common throughout IDA is organised under a director of studies for doctoral education and an office of doctoral education. A considerable part of the doctoral education is conducted within the framework of several graduate schools.

The Department of Computer and Information Science offers doctoral education within the following fields:

Doctoral studentships

PhD student positions at IDA are announced here. Note that some posts may be announced only in one language – either on the Swedish or the English page.

PhD courses

PhD courses at IDA are listed here.

More information

Contact the director of doctoral studies, Zebo Peng, forskarstudierektor@ida.liu.se, for more information about the various research areas covered by the department.

Contact the coordinator for doctoral education, Anne Moe, anne.moe@liu.se, for information about doctoral education.

For general information about doctoral studies and how to become a doctoral student, please visit the page doctoral studies.

Four subject areas at IDA

What is it like to be a PhD student at IDA?

Emma with VR headset on her head

New doctor in Cognitive Science: Emma Mainza Chilufya

On March 28, Emma Mainza Chilufya at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) successfully defended her thesis about human-computer interaction. "Being a PhD student at IDA has been eye-opening and inspiring", she says.

Dominik Drexler headshot

New doctor in Computer Science: Dominik Drexler

On March 24, Dominik Drexler at the Dept of Computer and Information Science successfully defended his thesis about integrating learning and AI planning. "Pursuing a PhD at IDA has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life", he says.

Mina Niknafs shows her printed thesis in the lecture hall.

New doctor in Computer Science: Mina Niknafs

On March 3, Mina Niknafs at the Dept of Computer and Information Science defended her thesis on resource management. "Pursuing a PhD at IDA is an enriching experience that combines academic freedom with a supportive research culture", she says.

Calendar of theses defences and list of recent theses at IDA

Calendar

List of recent theses

2026

Suleman Khan (2026) Secure Mobility and Authentication Protocols in Heterogeneous Aviation Data Networks (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181185690
Marc Friberg (2026) Perceiving Emergencies: Laypeople's Judgement, Stress, and Performance in Traumatic Bleeding (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181185973
Henrietta Palmer (2026) Collaboration for Transformation: Designing Boundary Spaces for Dealing with Difference (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181185515
Paul Höft (2026) Computing Perfect Cost Partitioning Heuristics for Classical Planning (Doctoral thesis, monograph) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181184532
Ehsan Doostmohammadi (2026) Toward Understanding and Enhancing the Training and Evaluation of Language Models: A Study on Vision, Instruction Tuning, and Retrieval Augmentation (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181184440

2025

Md Fahim Sikder (2025) Representative Synthetic Data for Fair Decision Making (Doctoral thesis, monograph) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181183757
Valency Oscar Colaco (2025) Hardening Tree Ensembles: Real-Time and Effective Evasion Defences Beyond Adversarial Re-Training (Licentiate thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181183269
John Tinnerholm (2025) Dynamic and Variable-Structure System Modeling for Equation-Based Languages: Applications, Methods and Tools (Doctoral thesis, monograph) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181183375
Filip Ekström Kelvinius (2025) Deep Learning for the Atomic Scale: Graph Neural Networks and Deep Generative Models with Some Applications to Materials and Molecules (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181181852
Ahmad Usman (2025) Trustworthy Software States through Attestation and Secure Updates (Licentiate thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181182347
Leif Eriksson (2025) Infinite-Domain CSPs and QBF: Fine-Grained and Parameterized Complexity (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181182149
David Hasselquist (2025) Toward Secure and Privacy-Preserving Communication over Non-Trusted Networks (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181181838
Joel Oskarsson (2025) Modeling Spatio-Temporal Systems with Graph-based Machine Learning (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181181173
John Törnblom (2025) Efficient Formal Reasoning about the Trustworthiness of Tree Ensembles (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181181296
Amirhossein Ahmadian (2025) Handling Novel and Out-Of-Distribution Data in Deep Learning: OOD Detection and Shortcut Mitigation (Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary) https://dx.doi.org/10.3384/9789181180749

Contact

PhD student positions at IDA

Image of Building E, Campus Valla. Photographer: Fotograf Jonas Järmen

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More about doctoral studies at LiU

About the department