ENROL is an interdisciplinary Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND doctoral programme at Technische Universität Wien that is set up to educate and train a new generation of 20 high achieving early stage researchers (ESRs) to study and develop novel technologies and engineering solutions for the life sciences.

ENROL is set out for a total duration of 5 years (60 months) with a 3-year (36 months) employment contract for the ESRs.

ENROL’s long-term goal is to empower ESRs to become future leaders in academia and industry, as well as entrepreneurs capable of setting up their own spin-off companies. The education philosophy of ENROL is based on creativity, curiosity, ability, and passion.

Training Europe's next top Engineers for Life Sciences

Over the last few years, the fields of life sciences and engineering sciences have mutually fertilized each other to a level, where cell biological samples have become major stimuli for engineers, and in turn novel technological inventions have become key driving forces that triggered discoveries in the life sciences. In the ENROL DP we want to push forward these ground-breaking developments by training next generation, multidisciplinary graduates for frontier research across faculties and disciplines at the interface of engineering and the life sciences. Our programme integrates/reunites a broad spectrum of scientific and technological fields related to molecular bioengineering, biophysics & biochemistry, biomechanics, biological imaging, biomaterials, computational modelling, and tissue engineering, offering the PhD students life-long flexibility for continued professional growth. Current limitations in our understanding of cellular interfaces are mainly due to the complexity of the natural environment of a cell, including tissue- or cell-type specific parameters. Furthermore, research on this topic has been hampered by technical and experimental challenges for the characterization of the surfaces and the cellular response, and by insufficient theoretical models. As a particular scientific focus, ENROL aims at engineering functional interfaces between inorganic and bio-organic systems in order to push them towards new levels of understanding and technological applications.