BAM junior research groups
Within the framework of its ‘Menschen – Ideen’ programme, BAM offers in its focus areas junior researchers from all over the world with proven excellence the opportunity to set up their own independent junior research group at BAM and establish themselves in the community.
As the leader of a BAM junior research group, you receive a tenured position at BAM.
In addition, BAM provides funding for staff and other costs for five years. This allows you to establish a competitive research group, usually consisting of 2–3 PhD students and/or postdocs. The specific conditions are call-dependent.
Depending on the focus of your research group and your career plans, you will conduct research in close cooperation with a university and/or industrial company.
Target group
BAM junior research groups are targeting outstanding junior researchers with international research experience who have received their doctorate in the last two to five years before the short proposal deadline. Periods of childcare are taken into account.
2026 call for proposals
For the 2026 call for proposals, the following topic has been selected:
"Autonomous Metallurgy"
In the past decade, experimental materials science has gone through two disruptive waves of topical development, one being high-throughput materials synthesis and one being the paradigm shift towards multi-principle-element alloys. The former has accelerated materials discovery via the production of a multi-element phase space in a single experiment, whereas the latter has allowed us to get a glimpse of the excessively large unchartered number of potentially useful alloys. The realization of an excessively large unchartered materials space and its multi-dimensional parameter space demands for two central competencies to transition from knowledge about the potential to making use of the potential for societal needs: firstly, a computational expertise is needed to screen large compositional ranges to predict where meaningful materials processing can begin. BAM’s strategic development with the creation of multi-scale computational modelling and data-driven materials discovery precisely meets this need. Secondly, automated basic materials characterization and sample preparation (metallography) are underway and increasingly offered on commercial testing platforms. In between sits the here proposed autonomous metallurgy, with the potential of closing a fundamental gap in our metals research value chain at BAM with a clear focus on bulk metals with realistic microstructures. This strategic initiative will enable data-driven and application-specific alloy modifications or discovery, generate metallurgical process, property, and microstructural data out of one and the same system, which eventually will enable data-based and machine-guided alloy discovery.
Application process
Junior research groups are selected in a two-stage process. In the first stage, candidates submit short proposals. Selected candidates are invited in a second stage to submit a full proposal and present it to an interdisciplinary selection committee.
The deadline for submissions of short proposals in the 2026 call for proposals is 31 May 2026. Only short proposals submitted via the BAM application portal by the deadline will be considered.
All information on the 2026 call for proposals is contained in the call description, please find them as well as templates for the research outline and the letter of motivation at the end of ths page.
Information on BAM’s focus areas is available here, while BAM’s departments and divisions, including contacts, are presented here.
If you have any specific questions regarding the 2026 call for proposals, please contact Prof. Dr. Robert Maaß at Robert.Maass@bam.de or Tel: +49 30 8104-1500. For general questions regarding the BAM junior research groups, please email juniorresearchgroups@bam.de or contact Mr Gunnar Tan at: +49 (0) 30 8104-1011 .