To be considered for a PhD, you must meet our requirements for enrolment:
If you are an international applicant, you should also consult this page before you apply.
The Graduate School of Health adheres to the national Danish guidelines for international research and innovation. Please find more information here.
Before you apply, you must find a main supervisor. Contact the department where you wish to study and discuss your research interests with a supervisor. A main supervisor must be on at least associate professor level and employed at the Faculty of Health, Aarhus University. A recommendation from your main supervisor is mandatory and has to be a part of your application.
Your PhD project needs to have at least one co-supervisor and no more than three. The co-supervisors cannot be enrolled PhD students themselves. One of the co-supervisors should ideally be international and from a research institution outside of Denmark. Please fill out the relevant information on the form "Motivation and competences".
You can search for relevant AU employees here and read more about supervision here.
Your application will be rejected if you do not have a recommendation from a main supervisor.
You need to prepare your application including the project description together with your main supervisor and co-supervisor(s) before applying for enrolment.
The project description should be no more than five standard pages in English (one standard page is 2,400 characters incl. spaces).
Please note that the following requirements must be followed strictly:
If the abovementioned points are not strictly followed, the application will be administratively rejected.
The project description should include background, hypotheses, materials and methods, research plan and perspectives with clear transparency of the applicant’s part in the project.
Your project description must be written so it is readable to people outside your specific academic discipline/field of research.
References should be included directly following the project description (not included in the max. number of characters or page numbers)
It is mandatory to upload a budget for your PhD project (from open calls 2025)
You are welcome to use this budget form (excel – should be uploaded as pdf.) The form is meant as an inspiration and you can choose to use another form.
The budget should be uploaded under "Other information to consider". You can only upload one file - so if you want to include different documents, you need to combine the files into one PDF.
The PhD administration cannot assist you in filling in the budget and cannot provide guidance on funding needs on your specific project. Specific funding requirements must be clarified with the department.
The budget is not used during the initial assessment of your application (allocation of fully funded stipends). It is used by the departments if applicants do not receive a fully funded stipend. The departments can grant relevant PhD projects financial support according to their own guidelines. If you have questions to how to make the budget and/or the department process, please contact the relevant department.
Your application will be administratively rejected if you do not upload a budget.
Updated 24 October 2022 - applicable from the ordinary PhD call opening February 2023.
During your PhD you will become part of an international network through presentations at conferences abroad and publications in English journals. It is therefore important that you have profound English language skills. To develop your language skills and to accommodate international PhD students, the PhD short courses are taught in English.
Excellent communication skills in English are considered essential, and PhD students must be able to read, write, and speak academic English fluently. English language requirement is comparable to a minimum of TOEFL 83 or IELTS 6,5.
Documenting required proficiency in English is mandatory at the time of enrolment. This means, you can apply without documenting required language skills, but you cannot be enrolled without submitting the required documentation.
To ease the processing of your application, you can upload documentation at the time of application.
For Danish applicants, TOEFL 83 or IELTS 6,5 correspond to passed English B from upper secondary school ("gymnasium") – please submit your diploma (“eksamensbevis”) as documentation.
If you do not have English B level from the Danish upper secondary school, you must document your English language proficiency by passing one of the tests mentioned below at the levels required.
We only accept below tests as documentation.
TOEFL:
English B – Test result of at least 83 (internet-based) or 560 (paper-based - please note, we only accept paper-based tests taken in 2020 and earlier. From 1 January 2021 tests must be internet-based to be accepted)
Aarhus University accepts the TOEFL IBT Special Home Edition test.
Aarhus University does not accept the TOEFL ITP (this includes the TOEFL ITP Plus for China Solution). The Aarhus University TOEFL code is 8935.
IELTS:
English B – IELTS Academic test result of at least 6.5 points.
Cambridge English Qualifications
English B – Cambridge English Advanced (grades A, B and C) or Cambridge English First (grade A) or 180 points as a minimum on the Cambridge English Scale.
We accept test results that are more than two years old.
All applications have to be submitted through our online form. You find the application form at the page open calls.
All forms and attachments to your application MUST BE UPLOADED IN PDF.
The online form has to be filled out in one session. It cannot be saved and completed on a later date. It will however stay open for filling out as long as the browser window is open.
When you access the application form, you need to choose the appropriate Graduate Programme (GP) – ClinFO (Departments of Clinical Medicine, Forensic Medicine and Dentistry), Biomedicine or Public Health. Choose the GP that reflects the department of your main supervisor.
Enter your unweighted grade average calculated and based on your transcripts’ grading scale, BSc and MSc separately.
The application form and all the mandatory forms for attachments (see below) are in English and should be filled out in English. Your CV should also be in English.
There are no requirements in regards to neither font nor type size.
If you wish to be affiliated with a subject-specific programme when you get enrolled as a PhD student, please choose which one in the drop-down menu.
To be part of a subject-specific programme, your PhD project must be within the research field of one of the programmes. You can read about the subject-specific progammes and the requirements here.
Under “applying for” you need to choose one of the following:
There is no fixed amount for when you should apply for partial funding, and it is up to you what you choose. Please consult your main supervisor regarding the needs for funding. The PhD administration cannot provide guidance on funding needs for your project.
The departments can grant relevant PhD projects financial support according to their own guidelines. If you have questions about partial funding from the department and their process, please contact the relevant department.
In the application form you will be asked to write an abstract and a summary. Both are meant as brief versions of the project description.
The abstract has to be under 1000 keystrokes in total, and the summary has to be under 5000 keystrokes in total. All keystrokes are included in the 1000/5000 count.
A recommendation from your main supervisor is mandatory. The recommendation should be uploaded under referee #1 in the application form – main supervisor and referee # 1 are the same.
Under "other information to consider" you upload the mandatory budget (se above)
In addition to the budget, you can upload other relevant documents in the upload field "Other information to consider"
You can only upload one file - so if you want to include different documents, you need to combine the files into one PDF.
Please note, attachments mentioned in brackets ( ) are not mandatory for all applicants. All forms and attachments to your application MUST BE UPLOADED IN PDF.
Please note that the following requirements must be followed strictly:
If the abovementioned points are not strictly followed, the application will be administratively rejected.
The project description should include background, hypotheses, materials and methods, research plan and perspectives with clear transparency of the applicant’s part in the project.
Your project description must be written so it is readable to people outside your specific academic discipline/field of research.
References should be included directly following the project description (not included in the max. number of characters or page numbers)
Applicants considered for a fully financed fellowship is expected to demonstrate that the project incorporates one or more of the above strategic criteria.
In addition, applicants considered for a fully financed fellowship are in expected to show commitment to the Faculty and the Graduate School of Health by taking on at least one task/active role related to the PhD education. Your motivation and competences must include a description of how you plan to show commitment. The tasks include:
Societal impact (fill in if relevant)
Your project has potential to create certain societal impact. This could be prevention of disease, improvement of treatment, new diagnostics or similar. Relevant collaborators/stake holders outside the research group may need to be involved to realistically create the intended impact, or e.g. commercialization and/or patenting may be a prerequisite to release the potential.
The Faculty and The Kitchen offers advice in the early phases of projects with commercial potential. Mainly to prevent promising research discoveries from accidental preterm publication, but also because there might be funding options to take into account. If marking YES in the form, a Faculty “erhvervsambassadør” and/or Kitchen representative will contact you and your supervisor.
* All applicants must document adequate English skills – see above under “English language skills”. You can apply without documenting required language skills, but you cannot be enrolled without submitting the required documentation. To ease the processing of your application, you can upload documentation at the time of application.
** Only for applicants who have been accepted for an Industrial PhD by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation.
*** Only for applicants who plan to have a PhD study programme with fixed periods of leave and/or part time. Part-time employment requires a minimum of 18.5 hours per week. Be aware that your enrolment period cannot exceed six years in total.
