Doctoral Student in Geographic Information Science (GIS) - Autonomous GIS

About the role

Lund University's GIS Centre, within the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, is looking for a PhD student in Geographical Information Science (GIScience), based at the GIS Centre. The research focuses on Autonomous GIS and Spatial Intelligence, exploring how artificial intelligence, large language models and multi-agent systems can make GIS understand complex spatial problems and plan and execute geospatial workflows autonomously. The student is both admitted as a student and employed at Lund University.

Key responsibilities

• Pursue doctoral studies and conduct independent research in Autonomous GIS and Spatial Intelligence, leading to a doctoral thesis.
• Develop research questions, investigate and develop new methods, design and run experiments, evaluate results and publish findings in peer-reviewed journals.
• Work closely with supervisors and other researchers at the GIS Centre; international travel may be required for conferences and research visits.
• Take part in doctoral courses, research seminars and presentations at national and international conferences.
• May take up teaching and other departmental duties of up to 20% of working time, depending on needs and interests.

Required profile

• A second-cycle qualification, or equivalent knowledge, and a relevant independent degree project of at least 30 credits.
• A Master's degree in Geographical Information Science, Geoinformatics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence or a closely related field.
• Good knowledge of AI and machine learning, including deep learning and large language models.
• Experience with AI/ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Good English, written and spoken.

Advantageous: practical experience with LLMs, agentic AI, RAG or multi-agent systems; geospatial libraries such as GeoPandas, Shapely, Rasterio, PyQGIS or ArcPy; knowledge of spatial reasoning and knowledge representation; scientific writing experience; previous research or publications in AI, GIScience or GeoAI.

The employment is a full-time fixed-term position starting 2027-01-07 or by mutual agreement, for the duration of the four-year third-cycle studies.