Candidates for postdoctoral positions are recruited after the completion of their Ph.D. or a first postdoctoral period. To be eligible, candidates must have defended their Ph.D. no more than 3 years before the start date of the contract. As the start date will be between November 1, 2026 and January 1, 2027, the latest eligible Ph.D. defense date will vary accordingly (approximately between November 1, 2023 and January 1, 2024).
In order to encourage mobility, the postdoctoral position must take place in a scientific environment that is truly different from the one of the Ph.D. (and, if applicable, from the position held since the Ph.D.); particular attention is thus paid to French or international candidates who obtained their doctorate abroad.
Mission
This postdoctoral position is part of the Inria UniCA–UCL associate team Graph-Cure, which aims to combine statistical methods for sets of graphs with robust and reliable causal graph learning, with applications to healthcare. The PDRA will contribute to two complementary research directions:
1) Uncertainty-aware causal discovery. The candidate will develop and evaluate ensembling approaches for causal graph estimation, integrating both parametric and non-parametric methods to produce robust and reliable causal conclusions under uncertainty.
2) Dimensionality reduction for causal graphs. The candidate will design and compare dimensionality reduction procedures tailored to causal graphs learned in high-dimensional settings, with a strong emphasis on interpretability.
These methodological contributions will be validated on a clinically motivated application: the analysis of single-cell gene expression data from lung tissue collected with and without steroid exposure, with the aim of tracing both therapeutic and adverse effects of steroids in severe asthma patients.
The PDRA will be jointly supervised by Dr. Irene Balelli (Inria UniCA), whose research focuses on causal discovery and disentanglement with applications to computational biomedicine, and Dr. Anna Calissano (UCL, Department of Statistics), whose research focuses on statistical methods for sets of graphs. Prof. Karla Diaz-Ordaz (UCL, Department of Statistical Science), whose primary research area is causal inference and the development of machine-learning-based estimators for causal quantities, will also be involved as a collaborator within the Graph-Cure team. Dr. Rocio Martinez-Nunez (Guy's Hospital, KCL), a Reader in RNA Biology and Immunity with expertise in post-transcriptional regulation in asthma and respiratory disease, will provide the clinical application context and data.
Collaboration
The proposed position builds on an active and growing collaboration between Dr. Balelli and Dr. Calissano, established in 2025. This collaboration has already secured EPSRC funding through the CHAI Hub (project CausalGene), which has supported a postdoctoral researcher in the UK (H. Araujo, January 2026 – June 2026) working on preliminary analyses of Dr. Martinez-Nunez's data. The two investigators also jointly co-supervised a master's student (A. Lang), who is now pursuing a PhD at Inria UniCA on related topics. The Graph-Cure associate team, for which Drs. Balelli and Calissano serve as principal investigators, was formally established in March 2026 to provide the institutional framework for this joint research programme. The Inria-DRI PDRA position would further consolidate this partnership, sustain its scientific momentum, and deepen institutional ties between Inria UniCA and UCL.
Instructions to apply:
You can directly send your application to:
Deadline for application: June 7, 2026
