In October 2025, the AI Grand Est ENACT cluster launched a call for projects to fund new AI research chairs. This initiative is part of the cluster’s strategy to strengthen scientific excellence across the Grand Est region in three key areas of expertise:
- Natural Language Processing and Multimodal Large Language Models;
- AI for Engineering and Scientific Discovery;
- Digital Health.
Designed to attract outstanding researchers from outside the region and the cluster’s partner institutions, these research chairs aim to strengthen the cluster’s scientific capabilities and foster new collaborations across its ecosystem.
Among the 32 applications received, including 11 submitted by researchers based abroad (United States, Switzerland, Australia, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and Sweden), 7 were selected by the evaluation committee. The successful candidates will benefit from comprehensive funding through 2029, including salary support, dedicated research resources (PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and research engineers), as well as tailored support to facilitate their long-term integration into the Grand Est research ecosystem.
The selected projects are:
- Apprentissage automatique frugal et fiable pour la génération de champs de force dédiés aux interfaces réactives
- Holder: Florian Brix
- Host laboratory: Institut Jean Lamour, (CNRS, UL).
- World Models for Simulative Reasoning in Surgical Decision Support
- Holder: Roger David Soberanis Mukul
- Host laboratory: ICube (Unistra, CNRS, INSA Strasbourg, ENGEES)
- Sociologie de l’IA en santé : des promesses aux pratiques
- Holder: Nicolas El Haïk-Wagner
- Host laboratory: SAGE-HUS (Unistra, CNRS, UHA, ENGEES, INRAE)
- Coding The Law: Ex-Ante And Ex-Post Compliance For Medical LLMs. From Legal Analysis To Technical Implementation: An interdisciplinary approach to compliance in healthcare LLMs
- Holder: Anastasiya Kiselava
- Host laboratory: CDPF – ICube (Unistra, CNRS, INSA Strasbourg, ENGEES)
- Spatiotemporal Regulation of Cell State Dynamics
- Holder: Peyao A Zhao
- Host laboratory: IGBMC (Unistra, CNRS, Inserm)
- Privacy-Preserving Multimodal Spoken Language Understanding for Digital Health and Medical Education
- Holder: Natalia Tomashenko
- Host laboratory: Loria (CNRS, UL)
- TRustworthy and Interpretable Artificial Intelligence for Digital Health: Integrating Privacy, Fairness, and Explainability (TRIAD)
- Holder: Kangsoo Jung
- Host laboratory: ICube (Unistra, CNRS, INSA Strasbourg, ENGEES)
These seven new research chairs join the nine chairs already supported by IA Grand Est ENACT since 2025. Together, they will help strengthen the cluster’s research capacity in its areas of expertise and enhance the attractiveness of the Grand Est region for top scientific talent, both nationally and internationally.
