Admission to Ph.D. Program (Semester 1, 2026-2027)
in the interdisciplinary areas of Life Sciences
(Last updated on 16 February 2026)
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IBAB is an autonomous Institution set up by the Department of Electronics, IT, BT and S&T of the Government of Karnataka in 2001. Over the last 23 years, the Institute has grown into a world-class institution offering educational programs in Bioinformatics, Biotechnology and Big Data Biology. IBAB has established excellent facilities in both computational and experimental Life Sciences and houses state-of-the-art computing infrastructure including Graphical Processing Units (GPU) servers, high-end workstations and high-capacity network and storage facilities besides well-equipped state-of-the-art bioscience laboratories for experimental work. The Institute has well qualified faculty with international experience and offers Ph.D. programs in frontier areas of interdisciplinary Life Sciences.
Research Areas
- Disease Genomics and Pharmacogenomics
- Epigenomics
- Multiomic integration (Cancer, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Stroke, Malaria, metabolic disorders, ageing, spermatogenesis) for biomarker discovery
- Single Cell-Sequencing and Spatial Transcriptomics
- Synthetic and Systems Biology
- Photoprotection mechanisms in biomolecules and Quantum Biology
- Graph Algorithms and Information Theory for Modelling Biological States using AI/ML
- Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Drug Design using AI
- Multimodal Data Integration for Biomarker Discovery using AI/ML
Eligibility
Master’s degree (2 years) in any branch of Life Sciences/ Biotechnology/Bioengineering/ Bioinformatics/ Computational Biology/ Computer Science and Engineering / Pharmacy /Medicine /Physics/Chemistry with a minimum of 60% marks or equivalent, OR
B.Tech./ B.E or equivalent (4 years) in any branch of Science/Technology with 75% marks or equivalent
Selection Procedure
National level proctored online entrance exam will be conducted on 17 May 2026. Results of the entrance exam will be announced within a week, followed by in-person interviews of the shortlisted candidates in the first week of June.
Please visit the webpage of IBAB for details regarding the faculty research areas and the PhD projects being floated for the current round of selections
Stipend / Fellowship
IBAB strongly encourages students with their own fellowships (CSIR-UGC, DST-INSPIRE, DBT-JRF and ICMR-JRF) to apply to the Ph.D. program
Exceptional candidates without a fellowship shall be provided with a competitive assistantship by the Institute
Application Procedure
Candidates who satisfy the eligibility criteria can apply online after March 01, 2026. The link to the Admissions Portal will be made available here. Candidates are advised to visit this site after March 01, 2026, for more details.
Important Dates
| Application Start Date | March 01, 2026 |
| Deadline for Submission of Application Form | April 30, 2026 |
| Mock Test | May 10,2026 |
| Date of Online Entrance Examination | May 17, 2026 |
| Date of Interview | First week of June |
| Commencement of the Ph.D. program | July 14, 2026 |
Contact