ETH AI Center Fellowships 2027: Salary, Timeline and How to Prepare

The ETH AI Center doctoral fellowship is one of the best-funded AI PhD routes in Europe: a full ETH employment contract paying CHF 73,100 in year one, a built-in two-supervisor model that pairs you with one PI from AI and one from an application field, and a cohort of only about 5–8 fellows per cycle. Applications for the 2027 intake opened on 15 September 2026 and closed on 27 October 2026 at 16:00 CET, with references due by 2 November 2026. If that window passed you by, this guide covers exactly what the programme pays, how selection works, which ETH routes are still open this autumn — and how to be ready when the 2028 call opens.

What the fellowship actually is

The ETH AI Center is ETH Zurich's university-wide initiative for interdisciplinary artificial intelligence research, and its fellowship programme is deliberately built around cross-field collaboration. Where a conventional ETH doctorate attaches you to a single professor in a single department, an AI Center fellow is mentored by two principal investigators from different fields who carry equal weight in the supervision. In practice that means a machine-learning researcher working with a biologist, a vision researcher paired with a clinician, or a theory student embedded half-time in robotics — the Center treats the crossing itself as the point.

The funding is equally structural: each fellowship is co-financed with up to 50% from Center-raised funds, with the remainder matched by the supervising faculty members. That matters for applicants because you arrive with funding already secured and supervisors already committed — you are not negotiating a position out of a professor's grant budget. The cohort is small by design, and the start date is flexible, though most fellows begin around September 2027 for this cycle.

The salary: CHF 73,100 rising to 83,500

Fellows are employed at the ETH rate 5 doctoral position at 100% level. The published 2027-cohort figures are CHF 73,100 gross in the first year, CHF 78,300 in the second and CHF 83,500 in the third — roughly CHF 5,300 to 6,600 gross per month as the contract progresses. Because this is a Swiss employment contract rather than a stipend, it includes the standard employer contributions and social insurance deductions that come with ETH employment.

Zurich is an expensive city — budget around CHF 1,800–2,500 for a room in a shared flat — but the fellowship is comfortably above stipend-style scholarships elsewhere in Europe, and doctoral salaries in Switzerland are among the highest in the world for early-career researchers. For comparison, the Center's parallel postdoctoral fellowship pays CHF 92,500 in year one and CHF 97,200 in year two, which tells you where the doctoral track leads.

The 2027 timeline, exactly as it ran

• 15 September 2026 — application portal opened (ai.ethz.ch/apply, the only accepted channel)
• 27 October 2026, 16:00 CET — application deadline for the 2027 doctoral fellowships
• 2 November 2026, 23:59 CET — final deadline for reference letters
• September 2027 (typical) — fellowship start, with flexible start dates available

The portal is exclusive: the Center does not accept applications submitted any other way, so there is no supervisor-email route into this particular programme the way there is for ordinary ETH doctoral positions.

What you submit

The application bundle is compact but has one unusual component. You complete the online form — which asks for your mentor preferences and your interest areas across AI foundations and application domains — and upload your degree certificates and transcripts, a motivation letter, and your CV. You also record a 2–5 minute video introducing yourself and your research ambitions. That video is not a formality: it is the closest thing the selection committee has to an interview before the shortlist stage, and applicants who script, rehearse and re-record it consistently outperform those who film it in one take at midnight.

Finally, you arrange 2–3 references, which must arrive through the portal by the reference deadline a few days after the main cut-off. Give your referees at least four weeks and send them the draft of your motivation letter — a reference that echoes your interdisciplinary angle is far stronger than a generic "excellent student" letter.

Who actually gets selected

The honest version: this is a small cohort at one of Europe's most competitive universities, so research evidence is the baseline. Most successful applicants hold (or are completing) a master's in computer science, machine learning or an adjacent quantitative field, with publications, reproducible projects or substantial research internships behind them. What differentiates winners is fit with the Center's founding idea — the ability to articulate a genuinely interdisciplinary research agenda that needs two fields and two supervisors to succeed. A candidate who can say "here is the AI method I want to build and here is the non-CS field where it will fail interestingly unless we solve X" is the archetype the program funds. Perfect grades alone do not carry an application; a clear cross-field story often does.

Missed the 27 October deadline? Four ETH routes still open

The fellowship door closed for 2027, but ETH Zurich itself did not. Depending on your stage, these are live options this autumn:

• ETH Excellence Scholarship & Opportunity Programme (ESOP) — the application window for the 2027/28 academic year runs 1–30 November 2026. It is aimed primarily at master's students, and it combines a full scholarship with a grant towards living costs. If your plan is AI Center fellowship after a master's, this is the classic on-ramp.
• RobotX PhD Fellowship — ETH's Center for Robotics runs a parallel fellowship for doctoral students in robotics and intelligent systems, with applications open until 27 November 2026. It shares the co-supervision philosophy and is the natural home if your AI interests are embodied.
• Regular ETH doctoral positions — ETH advertises salaried doctoral openings continuously on jobs.ethz.ch. This is the professor-to-professor route: you identify the group, make contact with a concrete research angle, and apply to the specific opening. Many AI Center faculty also hire this way.
• Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships 2027–28 — for researchers already holding a master's or PhD, with country-specific deadlines falling between September and December 2026 at Swiss embassies worldwide.

Preparing for the 2028 call

The 2028 cycle should mirror 2027: expect the portal to open around mid-September 2027 and close in late October 2027. That gives you roughly twelve months, which is exactly the runway this competition rewards. Three things compound over that horizon. First, research output — one solid publication or a well-documented open-source project added now changes your file materially by next autumn. Second, faculty mapping — shortlist three to five ETH AI Center core and associated faculty whose work spans two fields, and read enough of their recent papers to propose something specific. Third, the interdisciplinary narrative — start drafting the two-field story now and pressure-test it against people in both fields; the motivation letter and video both live or die on it.

Treat the deadlines as immovable. The 2027 cycle closed on a Tuesday afternoon at 16:00 CET, references followed within a week, and there is no late window. Put the September portal opening in your calendar, have your referees confirmed by August, and finish the video at least a fortnight before the deadline. The fellowship is small, richly funded and built for a particular kind of researcher — if that is you, the year of preparation is the application.