05 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leiden University, Netherlands

For our NWO-funded project “From ‘what went wrong’ to ‘what works well?’ Using Safety 2 principles to develop new cybersecurity solutions”, we are looking for a postdoc researcher interested in building positive cybersecurity solutions for individuals, teams and organisations. In this five-year project, we aim to develop cybersecurity solutions that organisations can implement in their ways of working based on what we learn from organisations where cybersecurity is managed successfully. The main research question the team will answer is: “What do successful organisations do differently on the individual, team, and organisational level to prevent the occurrence of cyber incidents or reduce their impact?” 

The Post-Doctoral researcher will be appointed for a period of eighteen months and contribute to the overall development of the project. The candidate is expected to carry out at least one research trip to a selected Special Political Mission of interest, which will be determined on the basis of the expertise of the PostDoc. This must lead to at least one publication in an international peer-reviewed journal. In addition, the candidate is expected to contribute to the conceptual and theoretical development of the overall project and co-author further journal articles with the Principal Investigator. The PostDoc is also expected (for 20% of the contract) to assist with teaching across several programs within the institute.  

Leiden University offers a post-doc position as part of the interdisciplinary research programme GroenvermogenNL, which supports the large-scale development and implementation of green hydrogen in the Netherlands and across Europe. The programme addresses the system-wide conditions required to enable a successful hydrogen transition—including policies, infrastructure, technology, safety, economic incentives, and public acceptance.

The postdoc will be embedded in a collaborative research team and contribute specifically to work focused on the role of public policy in shaping private sector investment in the adoption of innovative green technologies. This work builds on a categorization of policy instruments and investigates how specific regulatory and economic mechanisms incentivize (clusters of) firms to invest, for example, in hydrogen production, transport, and application, both at the EU level and within the Dutch context. The postdoc’s findings will contribute to understanding the interaction between investment behaviour of firms and regulatory design by government, inform the development of future scenarios for a clean European Industry, and support broader modelling efforts across the GroenvermogenNL programme. 

As part of this Postdoc position, you will be contributing to ongoing research projects where data management, processing and aggregation is pivotal to support complex decision-making. Through close collaboration with projects stakeholders, you will contribute to the development of data exchange protocols for Digital Product Passports and to the development of Decision Support Systems.

The focus of the position is the Lasers4MaaS project (https://lasers4maas.eu/), which will deliver a digital platform to enable manufacturers to make more sustainable and cost-effective products on demand. In this project, we are contributing to the development of future sustainable factories for manufacturing-as-a-service. This requires the connection of information systems to enable the exchange of data from operations to sustainability-based decision support. As a Postdoc researcher in this project, you will develop DSS and harmonize data collection protocols for sustainability and circularity assessment. These will be integrated into a manufacturing digital twin of laser technologies as a service, streamlining decision support for industrial operations.