How to Find a PhD Supervisor in Slovenia (and Get Funded)

Slovenia's PhD funding system doesn't work the way a "national scholarship" guide would lead you to expect. There's no single body you apply to as an individual student and wait to hear back from. Instead, the national research agency funds institutes and research groups directly, and those groups run their own hiring processes to fill funded doctoral positions. Once you know that, the search stops being "which scholarship should I apply for" and becomes "which specific funded lab is hiring right now," which is a more precise, and honestly more winnable, question.

Four universities, and a lot of PhD training happens at research institutes

Slovenia has four public universities open to international students: the University of Ljubljana and University of Maribor, the country's two large comprehensive research universities, and the smaller University of Primorska (based in Koper) and University of Nova Gorica. What a generic "universities in Slovenia" list tends to leave out is that a large share of Slovenian doctoral research actually happens at national research institutes working in close partnership with these universities, most notably the Jožef Stefan Institute (physics, chemistry, and information technologies) and the National Institute of Chemistry. Candidates at these institutes are formally enrolled in a doctoral programme at one of the four universities while doing their day-to-day research inside the institute's own labs, so searching university websites alone will miss a meaningful share of the country's actual PhD capacity.

ARIS funds institutions, not individual applicants

ARIS, the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (formerly ARRS), is the country's main public research funder. Its core instruments, research projects, research programmes, and the young researcher scheme, all require the funded work to sit inside an eligible Slovenian research organisation already on ARIS's register, a university, institute, or similar body. That's a structurally different model from a DAAD-style national scholarship you apply to directly: ARIS doesn't run a portal where individual PhD applicants submit a personal funding proposal and wait for a decision. The money goes to the institution first.

The young researcher scheme: apply to the lab, not the agency

The flagship route into a funded PhD is ARIS's young researcher (mladi raziskovalec) programme. A research organisation that already holds ARIS "stable funding" can open young researcher positions, and it's that organisation, specifically the individual research group and its named mentor, that sets the number of places, defines the selection criteria, and runs its own competition to choose candidates, not ARIS centrally. Once selected, the young researcher is funded for up to four years (4 FTE) on a fixed-term employment contract with a monthly salary, plus full coverage of the material and non-material costs the doctoral research itself requires. The practical consequence is that the calls worth watching are published by individual institutes and faculties, not by a single national scholarship portal, so following a specific lab's own page matters more than checking ARIS's front page.

If there's no open young researcher position in your field

Two other routes exist. First, some ARIS-funded research projects hire PhD candidates as paid team members without granting the specific "young researcher" status, worth asking a prospective supervisor about directly rather than assuming it doesn't exist just because no formal call is posted. Second, self-funded doctoral study remains available at all four public universities, with published annual fees for non-EU students commonly falling somewhere in the roughly €2,500 to €7,500 range depending on the institution and programme, confirm the exact current figure with the specific faculty rather than treating that range as fixed.

The visa step for non-EU candidates

Non-EU/EEA, non-Swiss candidates generally need a long-stay Type D visa, or in some cases a temporary residence permit, applied for at the nearest Slovenian embassy or consulate once you hold a confirmed university offer. Exact steps and required documents vary somewhat by host university and by your nationality, and several universities, the University of Primorska among them, publish their own detailed visa walkthroughs for non-EU applicants specifically, worth checking directly rather than relying on a generic Schengen student-visa guide.

A practical search order

• Identify which of the four universities, or which affiliated research institute (Jožef Stefan Institute, National Institute of Chemistry, and similar), actually works in your subfield.
• Find specific research groups and their named professors or senior researchers who are actively publishing, rather than relying on a general faculty directory.
• Check whether that group currently holds ARIS stable funding and has an open or upcoming young researcher call, since that's the strongest funded-position signal.
• Email the professor or group leader directly, referencing their specific recent work, and ask whether they have, or expect, an open young researcher position or another funded PhD route.
• If nothing is currently open, ask about joining an existing ARIS-funded project as a paid team member, or discuss self-funded enrollment as a fallback while a funded position becomes available.

GradScoutFunding is built for that identification and outreach step: it searches professors by field and country, confirms they're actively publishing, and drafts a personalized first email grounded in their real recent paper for you to review and send yourself. It can confirm a researcher is active and reachable, not whether their institute currently holds ARIS stable funding with an open young researcher slot, that's a detail only a direct email will surface. The free tier gives 2 credits with no card required, and paid credit packs are one-time purchases that never expire.

Common questions