PhD Thesis “Self-Driving Lab Investigating Effects of Accelerated Stress Testing in Water Electrolysis Cells

The AIT Austrian Institute of Technology is Austria’s largest Research and Technology Organisation (RTO). We aim to transform scientific excellence into innovation with impact. Together with our partners, we develop technologies and solutions for a sustainable, resilient, and digitalized future, strengthening Europe’s competitiveness and technological sovereignty. Our international teams combine cutting-edge research with strong implementation expertise to create measurable value for industry and society.

Our Center for Energy is looking for new Ingenious Partner for our location in Vienna (Giefinggasse, 1210). In the Center for Energy
, we develop sustainable, resilient energy systems to drive the green transition. As part of our digital transformation strategy, the AIT Research Acceleration Platform (ARA) integrates cutting-edge process automation, digital infrastructure, and data governance to accelerate scientific breakthroughs across disciplines such as novel battery materials, energy conversion and storage materials, microbiome engineering in agriculture or light-metal alloys.

Our team Energy Conversion and Hydrogen Technologies (ECHT) is a critical part of this platform, specifically with Energy Conversion and Storage Materials platform (ARA-ESM) dedicated to developing novel materials for clean energy technologies like water electrolysis and CO 2 conversion
. A major focus lies on combining high-throughput synthesis, advanced fast-track characterisation, and digitalised research workflows to accelerate the discovery of sustainable, durable, and high-performance solutions.

• You will support the ECHT team in its mission of transforming traditional materials research into a fully digitalised, data-driven pipeline for rapid energy technology innovation.
• You will play a central role within the ARA-ESM platform (Energy Conversion and Storage Materials) by piloting end-to-end automated and autonomous research workflows.
• You will develop, assemble, and operate a robotic platform to automate accelerated stress testing (AST) protocols for water electrolysis cells in conjunction with subsequent material characterisation.
• You will collaborate closely with the team’s Data Steward to establish FAIR-compliant, automated data capture, ingestion, and structuring pipelines for all experimental test sequences.
• You will apply machine learning, surrogate modeling, and active learning algorithms to link testing conditions with measured degradation phenomena and performance metrics.
• You will implement closed-loop strategies (e.g., Bayesian optimisation) to autonomously plan, execute, and refine subsequent testing parameters based on real-time data evaluation.
• You will publish your results in peer-reviewed journals and present your research findings at international scientific conferences.
• You will collaborate actively with interdisciplinary experts across robotics, software engineering, electrochemistry, and materials science within the ARA ecosystem.

Your qualifications as an Ingenious Partner:

• Master's studies in the field of Mechatronics, Materials Science, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, or a related technical field. (Your master’s degree does not need to be completed before your start date, but you should realistically be able to complete it within three months after starting the position).
• Very good programming skills in Python
  , including relevant data libraries (e.g., Pandas, Num Py, Sci Py) and workflow automation.
• Practical experience or strong interest in laboratory automation, robotics, and hardware-software interfacing (e.g., via REST…