The PEPR PROPSY will fund three junior chairs of excellence in 2026 to support innovative research projects in precision psychiatry.
Call opens on June 11th 2026.
Submission materials must be submitted in English and electronically no later than:
✔️Phase 1 : 15th of September 2026 at 11:59pm (Paris time)
✔️Phase 2 (detailed project) : 15th of November 2026 at 11:59 (Paris time)
✔️Phase 2 (oral) : December 2026
❓If you have any questions, please email Eugénie Favelier, Grants administrator: aap@pepr-propsy.fr.
❗It is essential to carefully read this entire document of the Call for applications.
Three junior chairs of excellence will be funded under this call, each focusing on one of the thematic area listed below.
The recipients of these chairs will be expected to contribute to the implementation of the program, help promote the thematic area at the national level (working groups, thematic workshops, initiating collaborations with industry, conferences, etc.), and help make their discipline more appealing to the younger generation. Teaching duties will not be mandatory for these chairs.
These chairs must be based within a laboratory established in France, offering a supportive scientific environment in the chosen thematic area. The recipients will receive support throughout the implementation of their project to ensure the sustainability of their work and to enable them to apply for a tenured position. The projects must be integrated into the French precision psychiatry program – PEPR PROPSY.
Chaire 1️⃣ Artificial intelligence (AI) for multimodal data analysis in precision psychiatry
🎯 The objective of this chair will be to develop and implement artificial intelligence approaches to analyze multimodal data in order to stratify patients, model care pathways, and/or predict treatment responses.
The successful candidate will draw on the PEPR PROPSY cohort and databases, as well as, where appropriate, other relevant national or international datasets, particularly large-scale, multimodal cohorts (clinical data, neuroimaging, genomics/omics, digital data, environmental data).
🤝 The awardee will work in close collaboration with clinical teams, biological research teams, and the teams responsible for the PEPR PROPSY data warehouse to facilitate the co-development of analyses and models integrating clinical, biological, and imaging data in order to identify and address relevant questions posed by precision psychiatry.
Chaire 2️⃣ Blood biomarkers and/or immunopsychiatry
This research area can cover different domains of blood-based biomarker discovery, in particular: immunology and/or omics area. The successful candidate may choose to focus the chair on the immunological area and/or the omics area.
🎯 The objective of this chair is to contribute to the identification of blood-based biomarkers (genomic, epigenomic, proteomic, metagenomic, metabolomic, or immunological) for diagnostic purposes, stratification, or prediction of therapeutic responses in patients with major psychiatric disorders studied in the PEPR PROPSY project.
The chair’s work will be based on biological data generated by the PEPR PROPSY and/or other databases and will be conducted in collaboration with national and/or international teams working in these fields.
In particular, projects aimed at exploring, based on data collected in the PEPR PROPSY, the causes and mechanisms underlying chronic inflammation associated with mental 7 illnesses and its consequences – enabling the identification of homogeneous subgroups (autoimmune, brain-gut, microglial, retroviral, metabolic, etc.) – will receive special attention.
This chair is intended to contribute, in collaboration with national and/or international teams in immunopsychiatry, to the identification of stratification biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets.
Chaire 3️⃣ Health economics
🎯 The objective of this chair is to analyze the medical-economic challenges associated with the psychiatric disorders targeted by the PEPR PROPSY (bipolar disorders, treatment-resistant depression, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders and firstepisode psychosis), as well as to measure the economic and societal impact associated with major challenges in mental health – such as treatment resistance and somatic comorbidities (e.g., metabolic syndrome, sleep disorders, and delayed diagnosis) – and to assess, within the programs developed by the PEPR PROPSY, the economic impact of proposed diagnostic or therapeutic innovations in precision psychiatry.
It aims to document the economic burden of these conditions, evaluate the efficacy of new prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies, measure the impact of precision psychiatry approaches, and inform prioritization decisions by mental health stakeholders.
✔️ Experience criteria: Open to any early-career researcher, regardless of current position or nationality, who has defended a doctoral dissertation (science thesis) or an equivalent degree within the last 3 to 10 years.
✔️ The research project must be conducted in a French host laboratory. The host laboratory must be involved in the design of the research project, and the candidate must ensure that the host laboratory has all the equipment necessary for the proposal, in order to guarantee the best conditions for success.
Junior Chairs of Excellence will be awarded based on:
✔️ the candidate’s scientific excellence,
✔️ the quality and feasibility of the project,
✔️ its alignment with the scientific priorities of the PEPR PROPSY,
✔️ and the candidate’s ability to engage the community around the relevant research areas.
Junior Chairs of Excellence will run for a maximum of 36 to 48 months, with an annual evaluation of the project’s progress.
Each chair will receive a maximum budget of 500 000€, including up to 18% in administrative costs.
The budget may be used to:
✔️ Fund the salary of the principal investigator and their team
✔️ Funding operating costs directly associated with the research project
The host laboratory must provide the selected candidate with adequate and sufficient space to accommodate an emerging team, as well as access to local technology platforms.
Any co-funding must be indicated and will be viewed favorably.
⚠️ It is essential to carefully read this entire document and the instructions available on the submission website.
No additional documents will be accepted after the closure of the call for applications.
Proposals must be written and submitted in English.
The submission package must be submitted to the website.
The templates for the CV and financial documents are available below on the webpage of this call for applications:
✔️ The financial appendix must be submitted in an Excel format (only for Phase 2).
✔️ You can find the resume template here.
❗Any application that does not comply with the submission guidelines will be considered ineligible and will not be evaluated.